ABSTRACT
To rebut the insinuation that psychoanalysis was unscientific and close to such a minor poet and mystic as Wilkinson, Freud could insist on his conviction "that all psychic events without exception are determined." But no sooner had he done that than he quoted not some nineteenth-century materialistic scientists but Borne. For he d i d not associate his own determinism w i t h mechanism and materialism, nor d id he derive i t from the scientists of that period. He knew his sources and considered "the incomparably beautiful essay" on nature the most important among them. But for that he might never have become a scientist.
