nought in later years still find consolation in the pleasure of chronic intoxication, or else they embark upon that despairing attempt at revolt—psychosis. Religion circumscribes these measures of choice and adaptation by urging upon everyone alike its single way of achieving happiness and guarding against pain. Its method consists in decrying the value of life and promulgating a view of the real world that is distorted like a delusion, and both of these imply a preliminary intimidating influence upon intelligence. At such a cost—by the forcible imposition of mental infantilism and inducing a mass-delusion—religion succeeds in saving many people from individual neuroses. But little more. There are, as we have said, many paths by which the happiness attainable for man can be reached, but none which is certain to take him to it. Nor can religion keep her promises either. When the faithful find themselves reduced in the end to speaking of God’s ‘inscrutable decree’, they thereby avow that all that is left to them in their sufferings is unconditional submission as a last-remaining consolation and source of happiness. And if a man is willing to come to this, he could probably have arrived there by a shorter road. FOOTNOTES: [4] 1927. London: Hogarth Press, 1928. [5] Goethe, _Zahmen Xenien IX_ (Gedichte aus dem Nachlass). [6] Wilhelm Busch, in _Die fromme Helene_, says the same thing on a lower level: ‘The man who has cares has brandy too.’ [7] Goethe even warns us that ‘nothing is so hard to bear as a train of happy days’. This may be an exaggeration all the same.