But I suppose you yourself attach more value to the other contradiction with which you tax me. Since men are so slightly amenable to reasonable arguments, so completely are they ruled by their instinctual wishes, why should one want to take away from them a means of satisfying their instincts and replace it by reasonable arguments? Certainly men are like this, but have you asked yourself whether they need be so, whether their inmost nature necessitates it? Can an anthropologist give the cranial index of a people whose custom it is to deform their children’s heads by bandaging them from their earliest years? Think of the distressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the feeble mentality of the average adult. Is it so utterly impossible that it is just religious up-bringing which is largely to blame for this relative degeneration? I think it would be a very long time before a child who was not influenced began to trouble himself about God and the things beyond this world. Perhaps his thoughts on these matters would then take the same course as they did with his ancestors; but we do not wait for this development; we introduce him to the doctrines of religion at a time when he is neither interested in them nor capable of grasping their import. Is it not true that the two main points in the modern educational programme are the retardation of sexual development and the early application of religious influence? So when the child’s mind awakens, the doctrines of religion are already unassailable. But do you suppose that it is particularly conducive to the strengthening of the mental function that so important a sphere should be closed to it by the menace of hell pains? We need not be greatly surprised at the feeble mentality of the man who has once brought himself to accept without criticism all the absurdities that religious doctrines repeat to him, and even to overlook the contradictions between them. Now we have no other means of controlling our instincts than our intelligence. And how can we expect people who are dominated by thought-prohibitions to attain the psychological ideal, the primacy of the intelligence? You know too that women in general are said to suffer from so-called ‘physiological weak-mindedness’, _i.e._ a poorer intelligence than the man’s. The fact itself is disputable, its interpretation doubtful; but it has been argued for the secondary nature of this intellectual degeneration that women labour under the harshness of the early prohibition, which prevented them from applying their mind to what would have interested them most, that is to say, to the problems of sexual life. So long as a man’s early years are influenced by the religious thought-inhibition and by the loyal one derived from it, as well as by the sexual one, we cannot really say what he is actually like.