“Obviously the depreciation and repression of such a powerful function as that of religion has serious consequences for the psychology of the individual.... One period of skepticism came to a close with the horrors of the French revolution. At the present time we are again experiencing an ebullition of the unconscious destructive powers of the collective psyche. The result is an unparalleled general slaughter. That is just what the unconscious was tending towards. This tendency had previously been inordinately strengthened by the rationalism of modern life, which by depreciating everything irrational caused the function of irrationalism to sink into the unconscious....” “There is indeed no possible alternative but to acknowledge irrationalism as a psychological function that is necessary and always existent. Its results are not to be taken as concrete realities (that would involve repression), but as _psychological realities_. They are realities because they are _effective_ things, that is, they are _actualities_.” So we need not be ashamed to admit that we pray! In this grim period of history, when the soul is face to face with itself and its brother as it has never been, we may speak with a greater simplicity than in the old conventionally-smiling days before the war. I pray--and so do you, whoever you are, if only by groaning “Oh, God!” when you suffer. Prayer is an instinct. Even an atheist will pray, if he finds himself beyond human aid. A friend of mine who was killed at the front used to take holy communion every morning, and he was doubtless a saner and better soldier for it. One need not be a Roman Catholic to see the beauty of that act of faith. Whether God be a “dominant of the superpersonal unconscious,” a psychological function, or a mathematical equation, makes not the slightest difference to me. As William James would say, “He works.” And whether the souls of our dead live in us, as Fechner says, or whether they are relics in the personal and collective unconscious, or whether they are “concrete realities” that can materialize by using astral and etheric substance, makes also not the slightest difference to me. If you could know how utterly I am at peace about this whole question! And many other differences appear, on close examination, to be mainly differences of viewpoint and phraseology. The “astral world” of the Theosophists, mediæval and modern, corresponds to a certain level of the unconscious. “X” says in one of the Letters which follow, written in 1917, that melancholy may be produced by the pressure of the unhappy dead who make us fear. If you locate the dead in the unconscious, which surges up in moments of passivity, the dead will have the same effect.