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>Atheism, rightly understood, is the necessary expression of a spirituality that has accomplished itself and exhausted its religious possibilities. This late form of world-feeling and world-image which preludes our "second religiousness" is universally a negation of the religious in us. The Megalopolitan is irreligious; this is part of his being, a mark of his historical position. Bitterly as he may feel the inner emptiness and poverty, earnestly as he may long to be religious, it is out of his power to be so. All religiousness in the Megalopolis rests upon self-deception.
>In this very century, I prophesy, the century of scientific-critical Alexandrianism, of the great harvests, of the final formulations, a new element of inwardness will arise to overthrow the will-to-victory of science. This is the path to "second religiousness," which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture. Men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect. The individual renounces by laying aside books. The Culture renounces by ceasing to manifest itself in high scientific intellects.
>Classical philosophy had exhausted its ground by about 150 b.c. From that time on, "knowledge" was no longer a continually tested and augmented stock, but a belief therein, due basically to force of habit, but still able to convince, thanks to an old and well-tried methodology.
>The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness — only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts with Rationalism's fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the Springtime become visible, and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase.
>Belief in program was the mark and the glory of our grandfathers — in our grandsons it will be a proof of provincialism. In its place is developing even now the seed of a new resigned piety, sprung from tortured conscience and spiritual hunger, whose task will be to found a new Hither-side that looks for secrets instead of steel-bright concepts and in the end will find them in the deeps of the "Second Religiousness."