B1054 <=> B1056 (BTG XLIII Beelzebub’s opinion of war, p. 1055)

Chapter XLIII Beelzebub’s Survey of the Process of the Periodic Reciprocal Destruction of Men, or Beelzebub’s Opinion of War

WHEN Beelzebub, Hassein, and Ahoon had returned from the “Djamdjampal” and had resumed their usual places, Hassein, again turning to Beelzebub, said:

“Dear Grandfather! Although thanks to your exhaustive explanations relating to different episodes which proceeded in the planet Earth during the process of the existence of the three-brained beings, I obtained a clear conception and convincing understanding of the surprising strangeness of their psyche, nevertheless the question still arises in me about one particularity of this psyche of theirs which I cannot yet understand at all and which, even taking their strange psyche into account, appears to me not logical. My thoughts constantly return to this perplexing question and were even concentrated on it during the sacred sacrament in the Djamdjampal.

“From all of your explanations concerning the process of the existence of these three-brained beings, I very definitely understood that although during all their responsible existence, particularly after the third Transapalnian perturbation there, they began to have chiefly purely automatic Reason, yet even with this automatic Reason they can mentate fairly often and deliberate so well that they are even able to constate all kinds of more of less exact laws of Nature on their planet, according to which they even invent something themselves.

“At the same time, parallel with this, the mention of that particularity of theirs proper to them alone, namely, the need of periodically occupying themselves with the destruction of each other’s existence, runs like a crimson thread through all your tales.