emerged two great practical freethinking forces, the teachings of
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-76), who was obliged to give up his lecturing
at Erlangen in 1830 after the issue of his Thoughts upon Death and
Immortality, and Ludwig Büchner, who was deprived of his chair of
clinic at Tübingen in 1855 for his Force and Matter. The former,
originally a Hegelian, expressly broke away from his master,
declaring that, whereas Hegel belonged to the "Old Testament"
of modern philosophy, he himself would set forth the New, wherein
Hegel's fundamentally incoherent treatment of deity (as the total
process of things on the one hand, and an objective personality
on the other) should be cured. [1951] Feuerbach accordingly, in
his Essence of Christianity (1841) and Essence of Religion (1851),
supplied one of the first adequate modern statements of the positively
rationalistic position as against Christianity and theism, in terms
of philosophic as well as historical insight--a statement to which
there is no characteristically modern answer save in terms of the
refined sentimentalism of the youthful Renan, [1952] fundamentally
averse alike to scientific precision and to intellectual consistency.
Feuerbach's special service consists in the rebuttal of the metaphysic
in which religion had chronically taken refuge from the straightforward
criticism of freethinkers, in itself admittedly unanswerable. They
had shown many times over its historic falsity, its moral perversity,
and its philosophic self-contradiction; and the more astute official
defenders, leaving to the less competent the task of re-vindicating
miracles and prophecy and defending the indefensible, proceeded
to shroud the particular defeat in a pseudo-philosophic process
which claimed for all religion alike an indestructible inner truth,
in the light of which the instinctive believer could again make
shift to affirm his discredited credences. It was this process which
Feuerbach exploded, for all who cared to read him. He had gone through
it. Intensely religious in his youth, he had found in the teaching of
Hegel an attractive philosophic garb for his intuitional thought. But a
wider concern than Hegel's for actual knowledge, and for the knowledge
of the actual, moved him to say to his teacher, on leaving: "Two years
have I attached myself to you; two years have I completely devoted to
your philosophy. Now I feel the necessity of starting in the directly
opposite way: I am going to study anatomy." [1953] It may have been
that what saved him from the Hegelian fate of turning to the end the
squirrel-cage of conformist philosophy was the personal experience
which put him in fixed antagonism to the governmental forces that
Hegel was moved to serve. The hostility evoked by his Thoughts on
Death and Immortality completed his alienation from the official
side of things, and left him to the life of a devoted truth-seeker--a
career as rare in Germany as elsewhere. The upshot was that Feuerbach,
in the words of Strauss, "broke the double yoke in which, under Hegel,
philosophy and theology still went." [1954]
For the task he undertook he had consummately equipped himself. In
a series of four volumes (History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to
Spinoza, 1833; Exposition and Criticism of the Leibnitzian Philosophy,
1837; Pierre Bayle, 1838; On Philosophy and Christianity, 1839)
he explored the field of philosophy, and re-studied theology in
the light of moral and historical criticism, before he produced
his masterpiece, Das Wesen des Christenthums. Here the tactic of
Hegel is turned irresistibly on the Hegelian defence; and religion,
defiantly declared by Hegel to be an affair of self-consciousness,
[1955] is shown to be in very truth nothing else. "Such as are a
man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as
a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is
self-consciousness; knowledge of God is self-knowledge." [1956] This
of course is openly what Hegelian theism is in effect--philosophic
atheism; and though Feuerbach at times disclaimed the term, he declares
in his preface that "atheism, at least in the sense of this work, is
the secret of religion itself; that religion itself ... in its heart,
in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of
human nature." In the preliminary section on The Essence of Religion
he makes his position clear once for all: "A God who has abstract
predicates has also an abstract existence.... Not the attribute of
the divinity, but the divineness or deity of the attribute, is the
first true Divine Being. Thus what theology and philosophy have held
to be God, the Absolute, the Infinite, is not God; but that which they
have held not to be God, is God--namely the attribute, the quality,
whatever has reality. Hence, he alone is the true atheist to whom the
predicates of the Divine Being--for example, love, wisdom, justice--are
nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is
nothing.... These have an intrinsic, independent reality; they force
their recognition upon man by their very nature; they are self-evident
truths to him; they approve, they attest themselves.... The idea of
God is dependent on the idea of justice, of benevolence...."
This is obviously the answer to Baur, who, after paying tribute
to the personality of Feuerbach, and presenting a tolerably fair
summary of his critical philosophy, can find no answer to it save
the inept protest that it is one-sided in respect of its reduction
of religion to the subjective (the very course insisted on by a
hundred defenders!), that it favours the communistic and other extreme
tendencies of the time, and that it brings everything "under the rude
rule of egoism." [1957] Here a philosophic and an aspersive meaning
are furtively combined in one word. The scientific subjectivism
of Feuerbach's analysis of religion is no more a vindication or
acceptance of "rude egoism" than is the Christian formula of "God's
will" a condonation of murder. The restraint of egoism by altruism
lies in human character and polity alike for the rationalist and
for the irrationalist, as Baur must have known well enough after his
long survey of Church history. His really contemptible escape from
Feuerbach's criticism, under cover of alternate cries of "Communism"
and "egoism"--a self-stultification which needs no comment--is simply
one more illustration of the fashion in which, since the time of Kant,
philosophy in Germany as elsewhere has been chronically demoralized
by resort to non-philosophical tests. "Max Stirner" (pen-name of
Johann Caspar Schmidt, 1806-1856) carried the philosophic "egoism" of
Feuerbach about as far in words as might be; but his work on the Ego
(Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, 1845) remains an ethical curiosity
rather than a force. [1958]