The Psychoanalytic Theory from an Evolutionist's Viewpoint

One comprehensive theory has motivated the overflow of the scientific spirit during the past half century; has at once directed investigation into unexplored fields and inspired a re-orientation in our methods of approach to the older sciences, even postulated in advance the scientific significance and results of those various investigations; and has categorically systematized all philosophical systems and exact knowledge, — for biology, psychology, sociology, religion, have been revivified, reconstructed, rewritten, in agreement with the Darwinian doctrine of natural selection as modified, or rather extended, by the investigations of De Vries and the Mutationists and of Weismann. But another theory of late years has been gradually attaining a similar status of an all-embracing a priori explanation of philosophical systems, and while not so extensive in its scope or application as the Darwinian, its advocates claim that it interprets for us the determinants of the sociological content of any organization or movement, — that is, that it is an explanation of human conduct both in its individual and group expressions. Naturally two so comprehensive theories must occasionally overlap, must at times make use of and attempt to causally explain the same facts, and it is imperative therefore, that we carefully observe the resultant conflict or agreement, modifying the one or the other which does not seem to conform to our present scientific knowledge, before we can safely say that either is a demonstrated explanation of all the phenomena it was designed to interpret. So far as I know, no one has attempted to analyze the points of agreement and of conflict between Darwin's theory of natural selection and the second of those great etiological theories which attained a commanding