too absurd. Moreover, if the argument from synchrony is to
decide, what is to be done with the fact that the religious age
par excellence would seem to be old age, when the uproar of the
sexual life is past?

The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end
look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness.
The moment one does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is
in the main from the content of the sexual consciousness.
Everything about the two things differs, objects, moods,
faculties concerned, and acts impelled to. Any GENERAL
assimilation is simply impossible: what we find most often is
complete hostility and contrast. If now the defenders of the
sex-theory say that this makes no difference to their thesis;
that without the chemical contributions which the sex-organs make
to the blood, the brain would not be nourished so as to carry on
religious activities, this final proposition may be true or not
true; but at any rate it has become profoundly uninstructive: we
can deduce no consequences from it which help us to interpret
religion's meaning or value. In this sense the religious life
depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, and the
kidneys as on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has lost
its point in evaporating into a vague general assertion of the
dependence, SOMEHOW, of the mind upon the body.

We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of
discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We
all use it to some degree in criticizing persons whose states of
mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticize
our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them 'nothing but'