In the Cartesian, Kantian, and long ago Erasmian (and for theologians, Pelagian) attitude, the belief was predominant, and still is, in this semi- or three-fourths Pelagian American Christianity, that everything is dependent on conscious decisions made in the center of our consciousness, and that everybody in every moment is able to make these decisions for good or bad, for God or against God.

Now such a belief, whenever it appeared – and I gave you the names: Pelagius^e, Erasmus^f, Descartes^g, Kant^h, and of course the English empiricists – was always, after a certain time, undercut by forms of new realism, of a new understanding of the human situation. In this country it was especially the belief in progress through the man-of-good-will who slowly will renew society by conscious decisions and conscious activities in such a way that the whole of human reality will be changed.

I already discussed the problem of progress, to the dismay of many of you, and there I said that the model of progressivistic thinking is man's technical activity, and that in this model the progress-idea is right, while if applied to man making conscious decisions, it is wrong.

The discovery of the unconscious showed this very clearly. It showed that this attitude of a psychology of consciousness, and morals of consciousness, and generally a philosophy of consciousness usually called idealism, was wrong. Something happened which, in religious terminology, was described as the “bondage of the will” – or something was seen again. It was not called so by the psychologists, but they discovered realities in man which confirmed the fundamental insight of man in himself of which religion has always been a witness.