The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, 1942 edition, which I read assiduously long before going up to Oxford and being taught not to rely on such summaries but to read the texts, contained a paragraph that made a great impression on me:

In those unformed days, it never occurred to me to question whose view this was or how the tiresomeness of a word ‘in that age’ could be gauged, and I similarly accepted that ‘complex’ had become as tiresome ‘in this’. And, in fact, humours were also called complexions.

My point in recounting this is that I also remember wondering as corollary whether the explanations of modern psychology would seem as quaint and unscientific in a century or so as the humours do today. In other words, that facile and perhaps dismissive comparison had one important effect: it instilled into me a solid dose of healthy scepticism about all scenarios (stories), however useful, that purport to explain human behaviour and, by the same token, their extremely curious byproducts.