‘You allow yourself contradictions which are hard to reconcile with one another. First you declare that a work like yours is quite harmless; no one will let himself be robbed of his religious faith through such discussions. But since, as became evident later, it is your aim to disturb this faith, one may ask: why in fact do you publish it? At another point, however, you admit that it might be dangerous, indeed very dangerous, for a man to discover that people no longer believe in God. Docile though he had been hitherto, now he would throw off all allegiance to the laws of culture. Your whole argument that the religious motivation of the cultural commandments signifies a danger for culture rests, in fact, on the assumption that the believer can be made into an unbeliever. But that is a complete contradiction. ‘And here is another contradiction: you admit on the one hand that man will not be guided by intelligence; he is ruled by his passions and by the claims of his instincts; but on the other hand you propose to replace the affective basis of his allegiance to culture by a rational one. Let who can understand this. To me it seems a case of either the one or the other. ‘Besides, have you learnt nothing from history? Once before such an attempt to substitute reason for religion was made, officially and in the grand manner. Surely you remember the French Revolution and Robespierre, and also how short-lived and how deplorably ineffectual the experiment? It is being repeated in Russia at present, and we need not be curious about the result. Do you not think we may assume that man cannot do without religion? ‘You have said yourself that religion is more than an obsessional neurosis. But you have not dealt with this other aspect of it. You are content to work out the analogy with the neurosis. Men must be freed from a neurosis. What else is lost in the process does not trouble you.’ Probably these apparent contradictions have arisen because I have been dealing too hastily with complicated matters, but we can make up for this to some extent. I still maintain that in one respect my work is quite harmless. No believer will let himself be led astray by these or by similar arguments. A believer has certain ties of affection binding him to the substance of religion. There are certainly a vast number of other people who are not religious in the same sense. They obey the laws of civilization because they are intimidated by the threats of religion, and they fear religion so long as they consider it as a part of the reality that restricts them. These are the people who break free as soon as they dare to give up their belief in its reality value; but arguments have no effect on them either. They cease to fear religion when they find that others do not fear it, and of these I have asserted that they would learn of the decline of religious influence even if I did not publish my work.