is human, to persist [in committing errors] is of the devil")—Freud concludes that the human psyche includes a compulsion to repeat that is independent of the pleasure principle. Speculation (sections IV–VII) Arguing that dreams in which one relives trauma serve a binding function in the mind, connected to repetition compulsion, Freud admits that such dreams are an exception to the rule that the dream is the fulfillment of a wish. Asserting that the first task of the mind is to bind excitations to prevent trauma (so that the pleasure principle does not begin to dominate mental activities until the excitations are bound), he reiterates the clinical fact that for "a person in analysis ... the compulsion to repeat the events of his childhood in the transference evidently disregards the pleasure principle in every way". Biological basis for repetition compulsion Freud begins to look for analogies of repetition compulsion in the "essentially conservative ... feature of instinctual life ... the lower we go in the animal scale the more stereotyped does instinctual behavior appear". Thereafter "a leap in the text can be noticed when Freud places the compulsion to repeat on an equal footing with 'an urge ... to restore an earlier state of things'" — ultimately that of the original inorganic condition. Declaring that "the aim of life is death" and "inanimate things existed before living ones", Freud interprets an organism's drive to avoid danger only as a way of avoiding a short-circuit to death: the organisms seeks to die in its own way. He thus found his way to his celebrated concept of the death drive, an explanation that some scholars have labeled as "metaphysical biology". Thereupon, "Freud plunged into the thickets of speculative modern biology, even into philosophy, in search of corroborative evidence" — looking to "arguments of every kind, frequently borrowed from fields outside of psychoanalytic practice, calling to the rescue biology, philosophy, and mythology". He turned to prewar experiments on protozoa — of perhaps questionable relevance, even if it is not the case that 'his interpretation of the experiments on the successive generations of protozoa contains a fatal flaw'. The most that can perhaps be said is that Freud did not find "any biological argument which contradicts his dualistic conception of instinctual life", but at the same time, "as Jones (1957) points out, 'no biological observation can be found to support the idea of a death