But now in our modern and well-informed time people cannot succumb to any degree of primitiveness or superstition, can they? We have great universities, colleges and schools, and children from a very early age have compulsory schooling. Even at a relatively tender age they begin having to read and study. And most even younger normally gifted children today know more about life and existence than the most learned scientists knew about the same things centuries ago. And we see the splendid results of this plethora of learning! Mankind has thousands of scientists, doctors, engineers, architects, designers and other specialists at its disposal for the creation of its culture, daily life and well-being. People have been able to practise veritable physical wonders. They control millions upon millions of Nature's horsepower. We can build huge engines and let these work for people, let these pour forth millions of useful objects. We can let the powers of Nature carry us over the clouds and under the water and over the motorways of the continents. People can sit at home in their own living-rooms and talk to friends or acquaintances on the other side of the planet. They can likewise in the same living-rooms hear concerts, music, song and speech from all the great stages and broadcasting houses of the world. A human voice can thus be heard all over the earth. Distance and thereby time and space are reduced to constituting merely a fraction of what they previously meant to people. Things that previously took months to achieve can now be carried out in a corresponding number of hours or minutes. The same therefore also holds true for the gathering of experience. Evolution is progressing by leaps and bounds.
      Among an informed mankind possessing knowledge and ability of such genius one cannot assert that there can be talk of primitiveness or superstition, can one? One has long since perceived the primitiveness and superstition in the cultures of the past. In our time one surely cannot fall for any kind of those naive ideas that can take root in general superstition. In our time witch trials cannot take place. We make a point of being splendidly defended by ingenious lethal weapons; indeed, with one single bomb we can today wipe out a city of over a million inhabitants with its population and culture so that we will undoubtedly gradually force the overly aggressive and offensive nations into silence. We also have a splendid judicial system with jails and prisons; so we will undoubtedly get the better of the gangsters and criminals and hold these in check. With our splendid staffs of doctors, our hospitals and medical science, institutes for research and vivisection we are sure to overcome illness of every sort. With our splendid trained experts and potential for production we will undoubtedly gradually out-compete other people and businesses and give work to our unemployed. With our social security and disabled and old age pensions we have created a splendid existence for the sick and the old. With our extensive schooling we will undoubtedly see to it that our people are maintained at a high level of culture. No, one certainly cannot justifiably assert that in our culture, based as it is on such highly developed science, there can exist any areas of primitiveness and superstition worth mentioning. We live absolutely on the basis of facts. What use do we have for religion and the Godhead, gospels and prayer? Such phenomena belong to the nursery and to the imaginations of dreamers.
      But is this self-assured view of one's own morality and behaviour,which to a greater or lesser extent appears as an ideal within the modern and leading civilised states, also based on true facts? If it is not, it can be based only on belief, that is on suppositions. And if these suppositions do not match reality, this ideal of the civilised states is in reality only primitiveness and superstition. Does that mean that there exists a possibility that the people of the future will look back on our present culture and in it find great areas of primitiveness and superstition, indeed find many of our present so highly praised practices quite ridiculous and naive in the same way as people of today find the culture of the Middle Ages full of ridiculous and tragicomical practices that were at that time praised to the skies as absolutely right and perfect? Yes, it is very possible indeed. As long as one within a given area, be it within the field of morality and behaviour, within family life as well as within the forms of governments or states, within medical science or within other sciences, can still reap experiences that can reveal faults in the prevailing view within these fields, and as long as one through the same experiences can improve the view, then this view has not reached its perfect or finished state. And then one will have to acknowledge, with every new improvement one is able to make, that the previous attitude to and knowledge about the given field were not perfect. But a knowledge that is not perfect is to a corresponding degree an expression of imperfection or primitiveness. Now, one cannot claim that the civilised resolutions, laws, social conditions and customs in force today are so perfect that in the fields concerned one cannot reap experiences showing that they contain shortcomings and faults that can be improved through these new experiences. One cannot either justifiably assert that the present cultural epoch is perfect and so free of primitiveness and superstition.