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It is impossible to pass judgement on the correctness of the thesis put forward and defended in this book concerning the significance of the trauma sustained at birth; but the very fact that we must of necessity refrain from giving an opinion upon the leading idea of the work amounts to a decidedly adverse criticism of the book as such and of the methods adopted by its author. All that is vouchsafed to the reader of the fundamental facts, the observations and experience upon which the author has drawn, is a few allusions at the beginning and end. For all these facts, which are essential to understanding and judging this book, we are referred to future publications, the work itself being composed chiefly of conclusions from and applications of a discovery the basis of which is only hinted at. The more comprehensive and grandiose the conclusions—and they comprehend nothing less than the whole process of civilization in all its potentialities and ramifications—the more ingenious and unerring the individual deductions and formulations, the greater the skill and certainty of the dialectic, the more are we sensible of this defect. We see a boldly soaring, gigantic flight of steps, which promises to take us to the clouds, but which unfortunately rests, not upon solid earth, but upon a few planks which have been provisionally thrust beneath it. We meet again all the author's well-known excellent qualities in this new work, sometimes even in a higher degree than formerly. But it is regrettable that we do not find that which distinguished his earlier works: the sobriety which is the indispensable condition of empirical science and which builds up its argument from the bottom and begins with the facts.
Let us for a moment suppose that Freud had attempted to introduce