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I sense the most beautiful and important things and hope that when the time comes you will not let yourself be dissuaded from publicly expressing your views, even if they are only conjectures. We cannot do without people who have the courage to think something new before they can demonstrate it.
Freud wrote these remarks to Fliess in December 1895, at a time when Fliess was struggling with various more than likely strange ideas, but more importantly at a time when Freud himself was struggling with his Project for a Scientific Psychology, a work that was brimming with brilliant ideas that Freud had the courage to think before he could demonstrate. What Freud had sought to do was to bring the study of neurobiology to the study of psychology, to what was to become psychoanalysis. To a certain degree, we can today do what Freud sought to do, and to a certain degree we cannot. Because even after all this time, we still must accept Freud's admonition and encouragement that there are going to be quite a few thoughts about psychotherapy that one must have the courage to follow even though they cannot be demonstrated (advice that Freud himself seemed unable to accept).
After rejecting The Project, Freud turned away from certain core biological ideas that he could not demonstrate; but he then replaced them with certain core psychological ideas, some of which were equally undemonstrable. But Freud tended to accept some of these psychological ideas not as hypotheses but as facts—as if a psychological idea, unlike a biological idea, did not require the same level of scrutiny, as if a psychological idea did not need to be tested. It took quite a while before that notion was systematically rejected.