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Promises of science. Modern science has as its goal the least pain and the longest life possible--that is, a kind of eternal happiness: to be sure, a very modest kind in comparison with the promises of religions.

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Forbidden generosity. There is not enough love and kindness in the world to permit us to give any of it away to imaginary beings.

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Religious worship lives on within. The Catholic Church, and before it all ancient worship, commanded the whole range of means by which man is set into unusual moods and torn away from the cold calculation of his advantage, or pure, rational thinking. A church reverberating with deep sounds; muted, regular, restrained invocations of a priestly host that instantaneously transmits its tension to the congregation so that it listens almost fearfully, as if a miracle were in the making; the atmosphere of the architecture that, as the dwelling of a divinity, extends into the indefinite and makes one fear the movings of the divinity in all its dark spaces---who would want to return such goings---on to man, once the assumptions for them are no longer believed? Nevertheless, the results of all that have not been lost: the inner world of sublime, tender, intuitive, deeply contrite, blissfully hopeful moods was begotten in man primarily through worship; what now exists of it in the soul was raised at the time of its sprouting, growing, and flowering.

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Religious after-effects. However much one thinks he has lost the habit of religion, he has not lost it to the degree that he would not enjoy encountering religious feelings and moods without any conceptual content as, for example, in music. And if a philosophy shows us the justification of metaphysical hopes, of a deep peace of the soul to be attained therefrom, and, for example, speaks of the "whole, certain gospel in the glance of Raphael's madonnas,"¹⁵ then we approach such statements and explanations with an especially warm disposition. Here it is easier for the philosopher to make his proofs; what he wants to give accords with a heart that gladly takes. We notice here how less careful free thinkers actually object only to the dogmas, but know very well the magic of religious feeling; it hurts them to let the latter go, for the sake of the former.
Scientific philosophy has to be very careful about smuggling in errors on the basis of that need (an acquired and, consequently, also transitory need). Even logicians¹⁶ speak of "intuitions" of truth in morality and art (for example, the intuition "that the essence of things is one"), which should be forbidden them. Between painstakingly deduced truths and such "intuited" things there remains the unbridgeable gap that the former are due to the intellect, the latter to need. Hunger does not prove that any food to satisfy it exists, but it wishes the food. "To intuit" does not mean to recognize the existence of a thing to any extent, but rather to hold it to be possible, in that one wishes or fears it. "Intuition" takes us not one step farther into the land of certainty.
We believe instinctively that the religiously tinged sections of a philosophy are better proved than the others. But basically it is the reverse; we simply have the inner wish that it might be so--that is, that what gladdens might be also true. This wish misleads us into buying bad reasons as good ones.

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On the Christian need for redemption. If we reflect carefully, it ought to be possible to arrive at an explanation for the process in a Christian's soul that is called the need for redemption, an explanation that is free of mythology, that is, a purely psychological one. Of course, until now psychological explanations of religious states and processes have been in some disrepute, in that a theology that calls itself free has been up to its bootless mischief in this area; for from the start, as the spirit of its founder Schleiermacher¹⁷ allows us to assume, "free theology" was aiming at the preservation of the Christian religion and the continuance of Christian theologists,¹⁸ who were to gain a new anchor, and above all a new occupation, in the psychological analysis of religious "facts" Undeterred by such predecessors, we venture to present the following interpretation of the phenomenon in question. Man is conscious of certain actions that rank low in the customary hierarchy of actions; in fact, he discovers within himself a tendency to these kinds of actions, a tendency that seems to him almost as unchangeable as his whole nature. How he would like to try his luck in that other category of actions, those that are generally esteemed to be the topmost and highest; how he would like to feel full of a good consciousness, which is said to follow a selfless way of thinking! But unfortunately it does not go beyond this wish: the dissatisfaction about being unable to satisfy the wish is added to all the other kinds of dissatisfaction that his lot in life generally, or the consequences of those actions, termed evil, have aroused in him. Thus he develops a deep discontent and searches for a doctor who might be able to put an end to this discontent and all its causes.
This condition would not be felt so bitterly if man would only compare himself dispassionately to other men; then he would have no reason to be dissatisfied with himself to any special degree; he would only be sharing the common burden of human dissatisfaction and imperfection. But he compares himself to a being who is solely capable of those actions called selfless and who lives in the continual consciousness of a selfless way of thinking: God. Because he is looking into this bright mirror, his own nature appears so clouded, so abnormally distorted. Next, the thought of this other being makes him fearful, in that it hovers in his imagination as a punishing justice; in every possible experience, large or small, he thinks he recognizes its anger, its menace, and he even thinks he has a presentiment of the whiplashes it will deliver as judge and executioner. Who helps him in this danger, which by its prospect of an immeasurable duration of punishment, surpasses in horror all other terrors of the imagination?