727. The same applies to the staunch materialist who preaches that every religious notion is "unscientific" and is "naivety" or "superstition". Here again it is only the setting that surrounds the light that he can affect. What he calls "naivety" or "superstition" is in reality only the terminology or the words and sentence constructions that the light is clothed in. He has not the slightest idea that he is himself an unshakable proof of the existence of the light, for if he had, he would see that all his wishes and longings or the whole of his normal well-being is based exclusively on the hope in the existence of the very light he is denying. He has merely clothed this light in a completely different terminology, in which it is even more impossible for the light to be acknowledged than was the case with the traditional terminology, but which on the other hand is in accordance with his denial. But if this denial really is in accordance with the deepest attitude of his consciousness to the light, and he therefore lived without any hope in it, he would be considered to be only a totally abnormal being. His well-being would then be based only on the hope in things that would go in the opposite direction to evolution. In order to be consistent with this hope, he would have to wish for mental darkness over and over again. Despite the fact that his own organism is a link or a step on the scale from darkness to light, that is to say from imperfection to perfection, and despite the fact that he can see organisms that are less perfect and organisms that are more perfect than his own – providing he is not suffering from an inferiority complex or delusions of grandeur – and furthermore he can see that this fate also applies to all other organisms, he still fails to acknowledge any of this as being an expression of continuous existence or immortality. Indeed, together with a large proportion of mankind, he will assert that these organisms certainly represent steps on a scale, and the beings' consciousness also likewise represents steps on the same scale, but this cannot possibly constitute any proof of reincarnation or immortality, since he is living under the superstition that the "living essence" in the being is the same thing as the organism, and must therefore have begun at conception in the womb, and will therefore bring its existence to an end when the current physical organism comes to its end. In his terms, all beings therefore exist solely for the duration of their present terrestrial life, and can exist only in this terrestrial life. He has not the slightest idea that his mentality signifies an attitude to or a view of life that is an expression of a culminating opposite of everything that constitutes his innermost wishes and longings, of everything that can be expressed as logic, and thereby as love. He is absolutely unable to understand that as long as he retains this mental attitude his awake, day-conscious perception can never under any circumstances be a truly scientific perception of the justice of life and its minutely precise logic. It is therefore impossible for him to find any particularly tenable mental foundation for higher ideals, morality or mental light.