Let us make a division here and separate those who risk their lives in battle from those who remain at home, where they can only expect to lose one of their loved ones through injury, illness, or infection. It would certainly be very interesting to study the changes in the psychology of the combatants but I know too little about this. We must stick to the second group, to which we ourselves belong. I have already stated that I think the confusion and paralysis of our activities from which we are suffering is essentially determined by the fact that we cannot retain our previous attitude towards death. Perhaps it will help us to direct our psychological investigation to two other attitudes towards death, one of which we may ascribe to primitive man, while the other is still preserved, though invisible to our consciousness, in the deeper layers of our psychic life. The attitude of prehistoric man towards death is, of course, known to us only through deductions and reconstructions, but I am of the opinion that these have given us fairly trustworthy information. Primitive man maintained a very curious attitude towards death. It is not at all consistent but rather contradictory. On the one hand he took death very seriously, recognized it as the termination of life, and made use of it in this sense; but, on the other hand, he also denied death and reduced it to nothingness. This contradiction was made possible by the fact that he maintained a radically different position in regard to the death of others, a stranger or an enemy, than in regard to his own. The death of another person fitted in with his idea, it signified the annihilation of the hated one, and primitive man had no scruples against bringing it about. He must have been a very passionate being, more cruel and vicious than other animals. He liked to kill and did it as a matter of course. Nor need we attribute to him the instinct which restrains other animals from killing and devouring their own species. As a matter of fact the primitive history of mankind is filled with murder. The history of the world which is still taught to our children is essentially a series of race murders. The dimly felt sense of guilt under which man has lived since archaic times, and which in many religions has been condensed into the assumption of a primal guilt, a hereditary sin, is probably the expression of a blood guilt, the burden of which primitive man assumed. In my book entitled "Totem and Taboo," 1913, I have followed the hints of W. Robertson Smith, Atkinson, and Charles Darwin in the attempt to fathom the nature of this ancient guilt, and am of the opinion that the Christian doctrine of today still makes it possible for us to work back to its origin.[2]