Different in kind is the satisfaction that art yields to the members of a cultural group. As a rule it remains inaccessible to the masses, who are engaged in exhausting labour and who have not enjoyed the benefits of individual education. As we have long known, art offers substitutive gratifications for the oldest cultural renunciations, still always most deeply felt, and for that reason serves like nothing else to reconcile men to the sacrifices they have made on culture’s behalf. On the other hand, works of art promote the feelings of identification, of which every cultural group has so much need, in the occasion they provide for the sharing of highly valued emotional experiences. And when they represent the achievements of a particular culture, thus in an impressive way recalling it to its ideals, they also subserve a narcissistic gratification. No mention has yet been made of what is perhaps the most important part of the psychical inventory of a culture: that is to say, its—in the broadest sense—religious ideas; in other words, the use of which will be justified later, its illusions. CHAPTER III Wherein lies the peculiar value of religious ideas? We have spoken of the hostility to culture, produced by the pressure it exercises and the instinctual renunciations that it demands. If one imagined its prohibitions removed, then one could choose any woman who took one’s fancy as one’s sexual object, one could kill without hesitation one’s rival or whoever interfered with one in any other way, and one could seize what one wanted of another man’s goods without asking his leave: how splendid, what a succession of delights, life would be! True, one soon finds the first difficulty: everyone else has exactly the same wishes, and will treat one with no more consideration than one will treat him. And so in reality there is only one single person who can be made unrestrictedly happy by abolishing thus the restrictions imposed by culture, and that is a tyrant or dictator who has monopolized all the means of power; and even he has every reason to want the others to keep at least one cultural commandment: thou shalt not kill. But how ungrateful, how short-sighted after all, to strive for the abolition of culture! What would then remain would be the state of nature, and that is far harder to endure. It is true that nature does not ask us to restrain our instincts, she lets us do as we like; but she has her peculiarly effective mode of restricting us: she destroys us, coldly, cruelly, callously, as it seems to us, and possibly just through what has caused our satisfaction. It was because of these very dangers with which nature threatens us that we united together and created culture, which, amongst other things, is supposed to make our communal existence possible. Indeed, it is the principal task of culture, its real _raison d’être_, to defend us against nature.