persist in calling ‘deeply religious’ a person who confesses to a sense of man’s insignificance and impotence in face of the universe, although it is not this feeling that constitutes the essence of religious emotion, but rather the next step, the reaction to it, which seeks a remedy against this feeling. He who goes no further, he who humbly acquiesces in the insignificant part man plays in the universe, is, on the contrary, irreligious in the truest sense of the word. It does not lie within the scope of this enquiry to estimate the value of religious doctrines as truth. It suffices that we have recognized them, psychologically considered, as illusions. But we need not conceal the fact that this discovery strongly influences our attitude to what must appear to many the most important of questions. We know approximately at what periods and by what sort of men religious doctrines were formed. If we now learn from what motives this happened, our attitude to the problem of religion will suffer an appreciable change. We say to ourselves: it would indeed be very nice if there were a God, who was both creator of the world and a benevolent providence, if there were a moral world order and a future life, but at the same time it is very odd that this is all just as we should wish it ourselves. And it would be still odder if our poor, ignorant, enslaved ancestors had succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the universe. CHAPTER VII Having recognized religious doctrines to be illusions, we are at once confronted with the further question: may not other cultural possessions, which we esteem highly and by which we let our life be ruled, be of a similar nature? Should not the assumptions that regulate our political institutions likewise be called illusions, and is it not the case that in our culture the relations between the sexes are disturbed by an erotic illusion, or by a series of erotic illusions? Once our suspicions have been roused, we shall not shrink from asking whether there is any better foundation for our conviction that it is possible to discover something about external reality through the applying of observation and reasoning in scientific work. Nothing need keep us from applying observation to our own natures or submitting the process of reasoning to its own criticism. Here a series of enquiries present themselves, which in their result should be of decisive importance for constructing a ‘Weltanschauung’. We surmise, too, that such an endeavour would not be wasted, and that it would at least partially justify our suspicions. But the author of these pages has not the means to undertake so comprehensive a task; forced by necessity, he confines his work to the pursuit of a single one of these illusions, that is, the religious. But now the loud voice of our opponent bids us to stop. We are called to account for our transgressions.