And then it occurred to me to ask whether the publication of this work might not do some harm after all—not indeed to a person, but to a cause: the cause of psycho-analysis. For it cannot be denied that this is my creation, and that an abundance of distrust and ill-will has been shown to it. If I now come forward with such displeasing statements, people will be only too ready to displace their feelings from my person on to psycho-analysis. Now one can see, it will be said, where psycho-analysis leads to. The mask is fallen; it leads to the denial of God and of an ethical ideal, as indeed we have always supposed. To keep us from the discovery, we have been made to believe that psycho-analysis neither has, nor can have, a philosophical standpoint. This pother will be really disagreeable to me on account of my many fellow-workers, several of whom do not at all share my attitude to religious problems. However, psycho-analysis has already braved many storms, and it must face this new one also. In reality psycho-analysis is a method of investigation, an impartial instrument like, say, the infinitesimal calculus. Even if a physicist should discover with the help of the latter that after a certain period the earth will be destroyed, one would still hesitate to impute destructive tendencies to the calculus itself, and to proscribe it on that account. Nothing that I have said here against the truth-value of religion needed the support of psycho-analysis; it had been said by others long before psycho-analysis came into existence. If one can find a new argument against the truth of religion by applying the psycho-analytic method, so much the worse for religion, but the defenders of religion will with equal right avail themselves of psycho-analysis in order to appreciate to the full the affective significance of religious doctrines.