Let us now leave primitive man and turn to the unconscious in our psyche. Here we depend entirely upon psychoanalytic investigation, the only method which reaches such depths. The question is what is the attitude of our unconscious towards death. In answer we say that it is almost like that of primitive man. In this respect, as well as in many others, the man of prehistoric times lives on, unchanged, in our conscious. Our unconscious therefore does not believe in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal. What we call our unconscious, those deepest layers in our psyche which consist of impulses, recognizes no negative or any form of denial and resolves all contradictions, so that it does not acknowledge its own death, to which we can give only a negative content. The idea of death finds absolutely no acceptance in our impulses. This is perhaps the real secret of heroism. The rational basis of heroism is dependent upon the decision that one's own life cannot be worth as much as certain abstract common ideals. But I believe that instinctive or impulsive heroism is much more frequently independent of such motivation and simply defies danger on the assurance which animated Hans, the stone-cutter, a character in Anzengruber, who always said to himself: Nothing can happen to me. Or that motivation only serves to clear away the hesitations which might restrain the corresponding heroic reaction in the unconscious. The fear of death, which controls us more frequently than we are aware, is comparatively secondary and is usually the outcome of the consciousness of guilt. On the other hand we recognize the death of strangers and of enemies and sentence them to it just as willingly and unhesitatingly as primitive man. Here there is indeed a distinction which becomes decisive in practice. Our unconscious does not carry out the killing, it only thinks and wishes it. But it would be wrong to underestimate the psychic reality so completely in comparison to the practical reality. It is really important and full of serious consequences. In our unconscious we daily and hourly do away with all those who stand in our way, all those who have insulted or harmed us. The expression: "The devil take him," which so frequently crosses our lips in the form of an ill-humored jest, but by which we really intend to say, "Death take him," is a serious and forceful death wish in our unconscious. Indeed our unconscious murders even for trifles; like the old Athenian law of Draco, it knows no other punishment for crime than death, and this not without a certain consistency, for every injury done to our all-mighty and self-glorifying self is at bottom a _crimen laesae majestatis_.