B525 <=> B527 (BTG XXXI Last sojourn to Earth, p. 526)

“Concerning each and every of their ways and means, the purpose of which was the destruction of each other’s existence, I had already had before this a definite logical confrontation which explained to me just what are the accidentally arisen surrounding factors that bring forth in them impulses and stimuli as the result of which their essence is gradually brought to such a phenomenal being-ableness to destroy, for no rhyme or reason, the existence of other beings similar to themselves.

“But for this new means, which I now saw for the first time, for destroying each other’s existence, my former logical and psychological explanations could not indeed in any way be applied.

“I had formerly explained to myself that such an exclusively abnormal inherency in their psyche is not self-acquired by the beings of the given epoch, but I understood that this terrifying periodic being-need was acquired and gradually assimilated by them during the course of very many of their centuries, also, of course, thanks to the abnormal conditions of existence established by the beings of past generations, and that this being-need had already become finally inherent in the contemporary three-brained beings, owing to external circumstances not depending upon them, and that it had become inevitably proper to them to occupy themselves with this.

“And indeed, my boy, during these processes, they usually instinctively at first refrain from such an unnatural manifestation, but later when every one of them already in the environment of the process itself willy-nilly sees and becomes convinced that the destruction of the existence of those similar to themselves proceeds so simply, and that the number of the destroyed always grows and grows – well then, each of them involuntarily begins instinctively to feel and automatically to value his own existence. And having become persuaded by his own eyes that the possibility of losing his own existence depends, at the given moment, absolutely only on the number of beings of the enemy side not destroyed, then in consequence of the strengthened functioning in his imagination of the presence of the impulse called ‘cowardice,’ and on account of the impossibility at each moment of reasonable deliberation by his being-mentation, weakened already without this, he begins from a natural feeling of self-preservation to strive with all his Being to destroy as many as possible of the existences of the beings of the enemy side in order to have the greater chance of saving his own existence. And gradually progressing in this feeling of self-preservation of theirs, they then reach the state, as they themselves say, of ‘bestiality.’