Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/165

Since our individual childhood and the childhood of human civilization, our hostile impulses towards our fellow-beings have been subjected to the same restrictions and the same progressive repressions as our sexual strivings. We have not yet progressed so far as to love our enemies, or to extend to them our left cheek after we are smitten on the right. Furthermore, all moral codes about the subjection of active hatred bear even to-day the clearest indications that they were originally meant for a small community of clansmen. As we all may consider ourselves members of some nation, we permit ourselves for the most part to forget these restrictions in matters touching a foreign people. But within our own circles we have nevertheless made progress in the mastery of hostile emotions. Lichtenberg drastically puts it when he says: “Where nowadays one says, ‘I beg your pardon,’ formerly one had recourse to a cuff on the ear.” Violent hostility, no longer tolerated by law, has been replaced by verbal invectives, and the better understanding of the concatenation of human emotions robs us, through its consequential “Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner,” more and more of the capacity to become angry at our fellowman who is in our way. Having been endowed with a strong hostile disposition in