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'It is…instructive', as Freud (1900) remarked, 'to get to know the much trampled soil from which our virtues proudly spring' (S.E. 5, p. 621). Wheelis in autumn reflects on the garden of his life since spring-time and, sadly, sees little but the soil. At least he admits to seeing little else, though he offers touching suggestions of how deeply he cares, how much he longs, how greatly he loves. He could not imply the existence of beauty lost as he does had he not known that richness himself. Yet facing winter and ending his book with an awful awareness of a world that speeds on without his presence, he narrows his attention to see only power and fear. These, he says, are the forces in the earth which feed the blossoms. As 'reflections on power and fear', the volume's subtitle, much of use is exposed. But as thoughts in response to his quoted introductory question, 'Your life will soon be over. What have you seen?', the lilacs and the columbine, the soft sweetnesses and glories of life, are hidden from direct attention. In their places are only endless power and fear.
'Normality is the free pursuit of power—curbed, in deference to prevailing morality, only enough to keep up appearances and to stay out of trouble… The will to power impels the rush of life; morality and fear constitute the barrier; the outcome in behavior is a compromise' (p. 80). That is Wheelis' theme. The rest is commentary.
Truth is ethereal. It is nebulous, and what of it is seen is always partial and untrue to the degree of its abstracted partiality. What is known is ever more true as it is known with ever more dimensions.
Wheelis' short, sad, lovely, lonely, bitter book has much truth and wisdom in it, aphoristically expressed, but, regrettably, all as seen from one side. The truths of The Path Not Taken edge towards an untruth to the extent that that one view, a unitary concept of motivation, fills the stage. Any truth loses value as it loses specificity, as it is generalized to uni