The understanding of causes sets free. Belief in the linkages discovered compels the world-fear to retreat. God is man’s refuge from the Destiny which he can feel and livingly experience, but not think on, or figure, or name, and which sinks into abeyance for so long--only for so long--as the “critical” (literally, the _separating_) fear-born understanding can establish causes behind causes comprehensibly; that is, in order visible to the outer or inner eye. It is the desperate dilemma of the higher grade of man that his powerful will to understand is in constant contradiction with his being. It has ceased to serve his life, but is unable to rule it, and consequently in all important conjunctures there remains an insoluble element. “One has merely to declare oneself free, and one feels the moment to be conditioned. But if one has the courage to declare oneself conditioned, then one has the feeling of being free” (Goethe). We name a causal linkage within the world-as-nature, as to which we are convinced that no further reflection can alter it--Truth. Truths are established, and they are timeless--“absolute” means detached from Destiny and history, but detached also from the facts of our own living and dying--and they are an inward liberation, consolation, and salvation, in that they disvalue and overcome the incalculable happenings of the world of facts. Or, as it mirrors itself in the mind, men may go, but truth remains. In the world-around something is established--that is, fixed, spellbound. Understanding man has the secret in the hands, whether this be, as of old, some potent charm or, as nowadays, a mathematical formula. A feeling of triumph, even to-day, accompanies every experimental step in the realm of Nature which determines something--about the purposes and powers of the god of heaven or the storm-spirits of the ground-dæmons; or about the numina of natural science (atom-nuclei, the velocity of light, gravitation); or even about the abstract numina that thought conceives in contemplating its own image (concept, category, reason)--and, in determining, fixes it in the prison of an unalterable system of causal relations. Experience in this inorganic, killing, preserving sense, which is something quite different from life-experience and knowledge of men, takes place in two modes--_theory and technique_,[467] or, in religious language, _myth and cult_--according as the believer’s intention is to open up or to confine the secrets of the world-around. Both demand a high development of human understanding. _Both may be born of either fear or love._ There is a mythology of fear, like the Mosaic and the primitive generally, and a mythology of love, like that of early Christianity and Gothic mysticism. Similarly there is a technique of defensive, and another technique of postulant, magic, and this, no doubt the most fundamental, distinction between sacrifice and prayer[468] distinguishes also primitive and mature mankind. Religiousness is a