ABSTRACT
Is it not shameful that I am thanking you so tardily for the great, indeed very special pleasure you have given me by generously sending me your new work on the mythology of the primitives? 1 Yet perhaps I can appease you by sharing with you the fact that it was the burning interest in your book that prevented me from writing. I let my own work sit; I took up the whole series of classic works on the mentality of the primitives you have bestowed on us; and that is what I have been immersed in for several weeks now. 2 I can tell you that this is already the third letter I have drafted— hopefully this one will get finished. For I really wanted to tell you about the problematic that your foundational investigations have set in motion in me and in connection with my long-standing studies on humanity and the environing world [Umwelt]. Not for the first time now, but this time with particular intensity. My attempt to articulate it turned out badly, partly because it threatened to degenerate 350into a lengthy treatise and partly because, while trying to shorten it, I was distracted by external disturbances . . . (I mention only that I unfortunately have to write many letters to help, with foreign references, as best as I can those who have been legally affected so severely by the <process of> building anew the German nation 3 — among them my own son, who, like yours, as a professor of jurisprudence, has the scientific vocation [Lebensberuf], or better, had, but now has to think of building a new future for himself abroad. 4 )
