I do not find that so striking. For do you suppose that men’s thought-processes have no practical motives, that they are simply the expression of a disinterested curiosity? That is surely very improbable. I believe, rather, that when he personifies the forces of nature man is once again following an infantile prototype. He has learnt from the persons of his earliest environment that the way to influence them is to establish a relationship with them, and so, later on, with the same end in view, he deals with everything that happens to him as he dealt with those persons. Thus I do not contradict your descriptive observation; it is, in point of fact, natural to man to personify everything that he wishes to comprehend, in order that later he may control it—the psychical subjugation as preparation for the physical—but I provide in addition a motive and genesis for this peculiarity of human thought. ‘And now yet a third point. You have dealt with the origin of religion once before, in your book _Totem und Tabu_. But there it appears in a different light. Everything is the son-father relationship; God is the exalted father, and the longing for the father is the root of the need for religion. Since then, it seems, you have discovered the factor of human weakness and helplessness, to which indeed the chief part in the formation of religion is commonly assigned, and you now transfer to helplessness everything that was formerly father complex. May I ask you to enlighten me on this transformation?’ With pleasure. I was only waiting for this invitation. But is it really a transformation? In _Totem und Tabu_ it was not my purpose to explain the origin of religions, but only of totemism. Can you from any standpoint known to you explain the fact that the first form in which the protecting deity revealed itself to men was that of an animal, that a prohibition existed against killing or eating this animal, and that yet it was the solemn custom to kill it and eat it communally once a year? It is just this that takes place in totemism. And it is hardly to the purpose to argue whether totemism should be called a religion. It has intimate connections with the later god-religions; the totem animals become the sacred animals of the gods; and the earliest, and the most profound, moral restrictions—the murder prohibition and the incest prohibition—originate in totemism. Whether or not you accept the conclusions of _Totem und Tabu_, I hope you will admit that in that book a number of very remarkable isolated facts are brought together into a consistent whole.