Civilised man is thus a being that is "dying". And this culmination of total death makes the being into an ice-cold, atheistic egoist or a one hundred per cent materialistic being. So what has created this transformation of primitive man into civilised man, or of the "living" being into a "dead" being? Is it not so-called modern civilisation? Is it not those who bombard the peaceful south sea islands and jungle terrains with their sophisticated, modern goods and evils, their technical phenomena and their deadly, alarming vices and illnesses? Have not these vices and illnesses poisoned and undermined the indigenous peoples' still partially preserved atmosphere of "paradise"? And are not these people in return moved by and interested in civilised man's technical and chemical capability? Is it not this modern witchcraft, the power-driven machinery, cars, aero-planes, film, radio, electric light and all the other results of material knowledge and capability, that plant powerful seeds of longing in the younger generations of these peoples? With such seeds of longing in their minds can they go on being the same people as before? And what are they longing for? What kind of an appetite does this meeting with civilisation bring about in the mind of primitive man? Is it not precisely to eat of the tree of knowledge? Is it not civilised man's tremendous capability that gradually becomes the ideal and the goal for the sons and daughters of the primeval forests and wildernesses? And what is this tremendous capability based on other than knowledge of matter? And how does one gain this knowledge other than by giving oneself wholly over to matter, to a life completely engulfed in thoughts concerning movements, vibrations, wavelengths, speeds, time and space, weights and measures? Dead matter thus constitutes the total or all-encompassing object of their interest in life. And has not one primitive community after another gradually entered the sphere of modern civilisation? And do you not think the same thing will happen to all the primitive communities that are still living in the forests and wildernesses? And is it not clearly a fact that as the beings are enriched with material capability or purely materialistic science, their faculty to believe dies out? The last tendencies to believe in the ecclesiastical concept of Providence or the godhead have long since died out in the leading academic or scientific authorities in the material field. It is not so much the ecclesiastical Christian religion as their material capability that the indigenous peoples mainly long for or feel infected by, even though they can naturally also to some extent temporarily derive pleasure from civilisation's religious objects of belief as a substitution for their religious instinct, which has still not completely died out.
      As we have seen, terrestrial man's mental road or spiritual evolution proceeds exclusively from the state of primitive man to that of civilised man, its consciousness in turn proceeding from instinct to intelligence. Whereas instinct constitutes the remnants of previous "cosmic consciousness", or "cosmic clear-sightedness", that is to say, a sensory faculty that gives "answers about life", pure intelligence on the other hand gives only "answers about matter", which in themselves merely express weights and measures or bare figures. In this way we can witness the two great principles of life or principles concerning the relishing or "eating" of life that the Bible expresses as the tree of life and the tree of knowledge.