‘That does sound splendid. A race of men that has renounced all illusions and has thus become capable of making its existence on the earth a tolerable one! But I cannot share your expectations. And this, not because I am the pig-headed reactionary you perhaps take me for. No; it is because I am a sensible person. It seems to me that we have now exchanged rôles; you prove to be the enthusiast, who allows himself to be carried away by illusions, and I represent the claims of reason, the right to be sceptical. What you have just stated seems to me to be founded on errors, which after your precedent I may call illusions because they betray clearly enough the influence of your wishes. You indulge in the hope that generations which have not experienced the influence of religious teaching in early childhood will easily attain the wished-for primacy of the intelligence over the life of the instincts. That is surely an illusion; in this decisive point human nature is hardly likely to alter. If I am not mistaken—one knows so little of other civilizations—there are even to-day peoples who do not grow up under the pressure of a religious system, and they come no nearer your ideal than the others. If you wish to expel religion from our European civilization you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defence. Something of this sort you must have in justice to the requirements of education. For you cannot do without education. The way from sucking child to civilized man is a long one; too many young people would go astray and fail to arrive at their life tasks in due time if they were left without guidance to their own development. The doctrines made use of in their education will always confine the thought of their riper years, exactly as you reproach religion with doing to-day. Do you not observe that it is the ineradicable natural defect of our, of every, culture that it imposes on the child, governed by his instincts and intellectually weak, the making of decisions to which only the matured intelligence of the grown-up can do justice? But owing to the fact that mankind’s development through the ages is concentrated into a few years of childhood culture cannot do otherwise, and it is only by affective influence that the child can be induced to accomplish the task assigned to it. And so this is the outlook for your “primacy of the intellect”.