[1959] gave his life to a disinterested propaganda of democracy and
light; and if in 1870 he capitulated to the new Empire, and thereby won
a small pension for the two last years of his life, he was but going
the way of many another veteran, dazzled in his old age by very old
fires. His Addresses on Religion, its Rise and Fall: to the educated
among its Reverers [1960] (1869) is a lucid and powerful performance,
proceeding from a mythological analysis of religion to a cordial
plea for rationalism in all things. The charge of "materialism"
was for him no bugbear. "Truly," he writes, "we are not without the
earth and the solar system, not without the plants and the animals,
not without head. But whoever has head enough to understand science
and its conquests in the field of nature and of mind (Geist) knows
also that the material world rests in the immaterial, moves in it,
and is by it animated, freed, and ensouled; that soul and idea are
incarnate in Nature, but that also logic, idea, spirit, and science
free themselves out of Nature, become abstracted and as immaterial
Power erect their own realm, the realm of spirit in State, science,
and art." [1961]