‘And now you should not be surprised if I intervene on behalf of retaining the religious system of teaching as the basis of education and of man’s communal life. It is a practical problem, not a question of reality value. Since we cannot, for the sake of the preservation of our culture, postpone influencing the individual until he has become ready for culture—many would never be so anyhow—and since we are obliged to press some system of teaching on the growing child which shall have the effect on him of a postulate that does not admit of criticism, it seems to me that the religious system is by far the most suitable for the purpose; of course just on account of that quality—its power for wish-fulfilment and consolation—by which you claim to have recognized it as an “illusion”. In face of the difficulty of discovering anything about reality, indeed the doubt whether this is possible for us at all, we must not overlook the fact that human needs are also a part, and indeed an important part, of reality, and one that concerns us particularly closely. ‘I find another advantage of religious doctrine in one of its peculiarities, to which you seem to take particular exception. It admits of an ideational refinement and sublimation, by which it can be divested of most of those traces of a primitive and infantile way of thinking which it bears. What is then left is a body of ideas which science no longer contradicts and which it cannot disprove. These modifications of religious doctrine, which you have condemned as half-measures and compromises, make it possible to bridge the gap between the uneducated masses and the philosophical thinker, and to preserve that common bond between them which is so important for the protection of culture. With it you would have no need to fear that the poor man would discover that the upper strata of society “no longer believe in God”. I think I have shown by now that your endeavour reduces itself to the attempt to replace a proved and affectively valuable illusion by one that is improved and without affective value.’