332 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

however, precarious inasmuch as it depends upon the fulfilment of two
conditions, both of which are evidently exacting and arduous. The first
condition is that the conscious personality must keep the subconscious
underworld of the Psyche under the Will's and the Reason's control; the
second condition is that it must also contrive to 'dwell together in unity'1
with the other conscious personalities with which it has to dwell on some
terms or other in the mortal life of a Homo Sapiens who was a social ani-
mal before he was a human being, and was a sexual organism before he
was a social animal. These two necessary conditions for the exercise of
freedom are actually inseparable from one another; for, if it is true that,
'when knaves fall out, honest men come by their own',2 it is no less true
that, when persons fall out, the Subconscious Psyche escapes from the
unwelcome control of each and all of them.

Plato's comparison of the demonic forces of the Subconscious to
mettlesome steeds, and of the controlling Personality to a charioteer, is
perhaps too flattering to the Soul. The Zen School of Mahayanian
Buddhism may be nearer to the mark in likening the Subconscious to an
ox and the Conscious Personality to a boy who has to win and keep con-
trol over the powerful and recalcitrant beast by cultivating the Orphic arts
of tact and charm.3 Mithraism, picturing the beast, not as an ox, but as
a bull, draws the conclusion that he cannot be domesticated and must
therefore be butchered if the Personality is to assert its freedom effec-
tively, and this militant attitude towards the Subconscious Psyche, which
is the antithesis of a Far Eastern modus vivendi, was bequeathed by
Mithraism to Western Christendom.

'From the beginning the Chinese seem to have favoured a dynamic
rather than a moral conception of the Universe. The specialisation of the
Intellect never assumed so great an ascendancy as to pit Reasoning Man
against Unreasoning Nature. Whereas the heroic attitude of the West
tends to picture Man in constant warfare with the destructive powers of
Nature, Chinese common sense prefers to convince the bull that a parallel
movement is better in every way than mere opposition. In the West the
dragon symbolises the power of evil or the force of regression, for the
Western mind is rooted in the idea that Man's original nature is evil. In
the East the dragon dwells on the highest mountains and is identified with
clouds and flowing water, because the Eastern mind sees spiritual events
as the interplay of natural elements. Hence the dragon, as symbol of the
inexhaustible potential of natural energy, represents beneficent spiritual
power.4 So long as it is conceived along Miltonesque lines as representing

1 Ps. cxxxiii. i.

2 Palmer, Samuel: Moral Essays on Some of the Most Curious and Significant English,
Scotch, and Foreign Proverbs (London 1710, Bonwicke), p. 337.

3 See Suzuki, D. T.: The Ten Oxherding Pictures (Kyoto 1948, Sekai Seiten Kanko
Kyokai), quoted in VII. vii. 506.

* Was Goethe inspired by some picture, or pictorial image, of Chinese provenance
when he wrote

Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg ?
Das Maultier sucht in Nebel seinen Weg,
In Hohlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut,
Es sturzt der Fels und fiber ihn die Flut:
Kennst du ihn wohl ?

Dahin! Dahin

. , Geht unser Weg; O Vater, lass uns ziehnl
Was it merely a chronological coincidence that an eighteenth-century Western philo-