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One hundred years ago there came into life a being whose long years of work and insight were to make such contributions to knowledge as profoundly to influence the civilization of every country. And we may safely say that the full impact of that influence has yet to be experienced. Whoever stands in my place in another hundred years from now will in his commemorative speech—and I am confident there will be one—be able to report further progress in the assimilation and application of Freud's discoveries to an extent which it is impossible for us now to predict. And we may well wonder how his attitude to Freud's personality will differ from our own. Some of us are trying to record the outlines of that personality so as to convey as much as possible of it to our descendants, and it is the difficulties in the way of doing so in a satisfactory fashion that furnishes a theme for our considerations today.
To begin with, we should ask what indeed is our own attitude. Before doing so, however, I wish to draw your attention to two peculiar features in Freud's achievement which have greatly affected this matter of attitude. To make them clearer I will contrast them with corresponding features in the achievement of the other great man of science of our period, Einstein. The first of the features is the loneliness of Freud's achievement. That in itself is a measure of his revolutionary originality and also of the pre-eminent degree of courage needed for such a feat. Although I have tried to trace earlier possible influences on Freud's mode of thought and the casual hints thrown out by previous writers, it still remains true that his work was essentially