On the origin of religion. – The metaphysical need is not the origin of religion, as Schopenhauer26 has it, but only a late offshoot of it. Under the rule of religious ideas, one has got used to the idea of ‘another world (behind, below, above)’ and feels an unpleasant emptiness and deprivation at the annihilation of religious delusions – and from this feeling grows now ‘another world’, but this time only a metaphysical and not a religious one. But what led to the belief in ‘another world’ in primordial times was not a drive or need, but an error in the interpretation of certain natural events, an embarrassing lapse of the intellect.