You shall not find me impervious to your criticism. I know how difficult it is to avoid illusions; perhaps even the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature. But I hold fast to one distinction. My illusions—apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them—are not, like the religious ones, incapable of correction, they have no delusional character. If experience should show—not to me, but to others after me who think as I do—that we are mistaken, then we shall give up our expectations. Take my endeavour for what it is. A psychologist, who does not deceive himself about the difficulty of finding his bearings in this world, strives to review the development of mankind in accord with what insight he has won from studying the mental processes of the individual during his development from childhood to manhood. In this connection the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to assume that mankind will overcome this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neuroses. These pieces of knowledge from individual psychology may be inadequate, their application to the human race unjustified, the optimism without foundation; I grant you the uncertainty of all these things. But often we cannot refrain from saying what we think, excusing ourselves on the ground that it is given for no more than it is worth. And there are two points that I must dwell on a little longer. First, the weakness of my position does not betoken any strengthening of yours. I think you are defending a lost cause. We may insist as much as we like that the human intellect is weak in comparison with human instincts, and be right in doing so. But nevertheless there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little. And one can make it a starting-point for yet other hopes. The primacy of the intellect certainly lies in the far, far, but still probably not infinite, distance. And as it will presumably set itself the same aims that you expect to be realized by your God—of course within human limits, in so far as external reality, Ἀνάγκη, allows it—the brotherhood of man and the reduction of suffering, we may say that our antagonism is only a temporary and not an irreconcilable one. We desire the same things, but you are more impatient, more exacting, and—why should I not say it—more selfish than I and those like me. You would have the state of bliss to begin immediately after death; you ask of it the impossible, and you will not surrender the claim of the individual. Of these wishes our god Αόγος[4] will realize those which external nature permits, but he will do this very gradually, only in the