The metaphysical need is not the origin of religions, as Schopenhauer will have it, but only an aftershoot of them. Under the domination of religious notions one became accustomed to the idea of ‘another (back, under, over) world’ and with the destruction of religious notions felt an uncomfortable emptiness and deprivation – and out of this feeling there again grew ‘another world’, but this time only a metaphysical and no longer a religious one. That which in primeval times led to the assumption of ‘another world’ at all was, however, not a drive and need but an error in the interpretation of
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