is left; the form of representation must be actually overcome.  The Christian contraposition of the present world and that which is beyond is explained by the fact that the sensuo-rational spirit of man, so long as it does not philosophically know itself as the unity of the infinite and the finite, but only feels itself as finite, sensuo-empirical consciousness, projects the infinite, which it has in itself, as though this were something foreign, looks on it as something beyond the world.  This separation of faith is entirely unphilosophical; it is the mission of the philosopher to reduce all that is beyond the world to the present.  Thus for him immortality is not something to come, but the spirit’s own power to rise above the finite to the Idea.  And like future existence, so the transcendent God also disappears.  The absolute is the universal unity of the world, which posits and sublates the individual as its modes.  God is the being in all existence, the life in all that lives, the thought in all that think:  he does not stand as an individual person beside and above other persons, but is the infinite which personifies itself and attains to consciousness in human spirits, and this from eternity; before there was a humanity of earth there were spirits on other stars, in whom God reflected himself.

Three decades later Strauss again created a sensation by his confession of materialism and atheism, The Old Faith and the New, 1872 (since the second edition, “With a Postscript as Preface"),[1] in which he continues the conflict against religious dualism.  The question “Are we”—­the cultured men of the day—­“still Christians?” is answered in the negative.  Christianity is a cult of poverty, despising the world, and antagonistic to labor and culture; but we have learned to esteem science and art, riches and acquisition, as the chief levers of culture and of human progress.  Christianity dualistically tears apart body and soul, time and eternity, the world and God; we need no Creator, for the life-process has neither beginning nor end.  The world is framed for the highest reason, it is true, but it has not been framed by a highest reason.  Our highest Idea is the All, which is conformed to law, and instinct with life and reason, and our feeling toward the universe—­the consciousness of dependence on its laws—­exercises no less of ethical influence, is no less full of reverence, and no less exposed to injury from an irreverent pessimism, than the feeling of the devout of the old type toward their God.  Hence the answer to the second question “Have we still a religion?” maybe couched in the affirmative.  The new faith does not need a cultus and a Church.  Since the dry services of the free congregations offer nothing for the fancy and the spirit, the edification of the heart must be accomplished in other ways—­by participation in the interests of humanity, in the national life, and, not last, by aesthetic enjoyment.  Thus in his last work, which in two appendices reaches a discussion of the great German poets and musicians, the old man returns to a thought to which he had given earlier expression, that the religious cultus should be replaced by the cultus of genius.