By God's grace our German stock has been able to produce mighty heroes of thought, from Boniface and Walter von der Vogelweide down to Goethe and Schiller, and they have become a light and blessing to all posterity. They worked for humanity at large, and yet they were strictly well-contained Germans, that is to say, personalities, men. We need such men to-day more than ever.

The gist of my argument is that men like Kraepelin, Bleuler and Freud were not what they claimed or seem to be—namely, physicians or medical investigators; they were, in fact, religious-political leaders and conquerors. Instead of discovering new diseases, they extended, through psychiatry, the imagery, vocabulary, jurisdiction, and hence the territory of medicine to what they were not, and are not, diseases in the original Virchowian sense.

Jung believed that he was proceeding scientifically, but most Freudians remain convinced that he was inventing his own underground realm, rather as Tolkien invented Middle Earth. There is at least an element of truth in this view.

The greatest psychopathologist has been Freud. Freud was a hero. He descended to the “Underworld” and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see if we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defense.

Judged against the criterion of the use of available fact, the greatest psychologists of our century are William James and Carl Jung.5 Both of these men avoided the narrow paths of behaviorism and experimentalism. Both fought to preserve experience and consciousness as an area of scientific research. Both kept open to the advance of scientific theory and both refused to shut off eastern scholarship from consideration.

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.

Looking at these men, and realizing how high they stand among humanity, how far they have gone in human evolution, is it not logical to say that we cannot see the bounds of human attainment, and that there may well have been, and even now may be, men far further developed even than they, men great in spirituality as well as knowledge or artistic power, men complete as regards human perfections—men precisely such as the Adepts or Supermen whom some of us have had the inestimable privilege to encounter? This galaxy of human genius that enriches and beautifies the pages of history is at the same time the glory and the hope of all mankind, for we know that these Greater Ones are the forerunners of the rest, and that they flash out as beacons, as veritable light-bearers to show us the path which we must tread if we wish to reach the glory which shall presently be revealed.

This psychological phenomenon was brought about mainly by the efforts of two men... Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel. Both were fervent Darwinists... These two men were exceedingly able; but they spoke with the voice of authority on subjects which they themselves, in many particulars, were merely guessing at. These conclusions are not mine alone. They are also the conclusions of many scientific researchers and thinkers of today. (Ch 3)

All the men who are now called discoverers, in every matter ruled by thought, have been men versed in the minds of their predecessors, and learned in what had been before them. There is not one exception. I do not say that every man has made direct acquantance with the whole of his mental ancestry... But... it is remarkable how many of the greatest names in all departments of knowledge have been real antiquaries in their several subjects.
I may cite among those... in science, Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Ramus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Napier, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke.

Freud, Galileo and Darwin told us, at different times and in different ways, that we are not the center of the universe; that we do not have control; that we do not fully understand our motivations; that we are not all that special. They did not have an easy time of it—for each society wants to believe that it can exercise control over its own destiny and over others. I suspect their findings apply not just to science or personal behavior, but to the way power and leverage can be exercised by nation states. Yours, I suspect, will be the first generation which will have to achieve results with neither military nor economic predominance—no matter where you sit.

They were not so created by any extra-cosmic Deity, but they are men who have become what they are by means of inward spiritual striving, by spiritual and intellectual yearning, by aspiration to be greater and better, nobler and higher. They are not what they are by any favoritism either of a god or of Fate, but have merely run ahead of the great multitude of men. There they stand; they are Helpers, they are Seers, they are Sages.

Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.

But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world's great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found.

In professional circles the following were the most highly regarded: Beck, Halder, Manstein, Heinrich Stulpnagel, Fritzsche, and Brauchitsch. Also Rundstedt, although he was not as active in the War Ministry. General Beck was undoubtedly the greatest spirit in the general staff. However, he was always of the opinion that war would be a catastrophe and in this opinion he found a great friend in General Gamelin. In the general staff we always said that General Halder and General Manstein had received ‘the necessary two drops of the wisdom of Solomon’. In the top level of the general staff, Manstein was regarded as the ablest and most original planner. That is also my opinion. However, there was no Schlieffen.