[Footnote 1:  English translation by Mathilde Blind, 1873.]

As Strauss went over from Hegelianism to pantheism, so Ludwig Feuerbach[1] (1804-72), a son of the great jurist, Anselm Feuerbach, after he had for a short time moved in the same direction, took the opposite, the individualistic course, only, like Strauss, to end at last in materialism.  “My first thought,” as he himself describes the course of his development, “was God; my second, reason; my third and last, man.”  As theology has been overcome by Hegel’s philosophy of reason, so this in turn must give place to the philosophy of man.  “The new philosophy makes man, including nature as his basis, the highest and sole subject of philosophy, and, consequently, anthropology the universal science.”  Only that which is immediately self-evident is true and divine.  But only that which is sensible is evident (sonnenklar); it is only where sensibility begins that all doubt and conflict cease.  Sensible beings alone are true, real beings; existence in space and time is alone existence; truth, reality, and sensibility are identical.  While the old philosophy took for its starting point the principle, “I am an abstract, a merely thinking being; the body does not belong to my essence,” the new philosophy, on the other hand, begins with the principle, “I am a real, a sensible being; the body in its totality is my ego, my essence itself.”  Feuerbach, however, uses the concept of sensibility in so wide and vague a sense that, supported—­or deceived—­by the ambiguity of the word sensation, he includes under it even the most elevated and sacred feelings.  Even the objects of art are seen, heard, and felt; even the souls of other men are sensed.  In the sensations the deepest and highest truths are concealed.  Not only the external, but the internal also, not only flesh, but spirit, not only the thing, but the ego, not only the finite, the phenomenal, but also the true divine essence is an object of the senses.  Sensation proves the existence of objects outside our head—­there is no other proof of being than love, than sensation in general.  Everything is perceivable by the senses, if not directly, yet indirectly, if not with the vulgar, untrained senses, yet with the “cultivated senses,” if not with the eye of the anatomist or chemist, yet with that of the philosopher.  All our ideas spring from the senses, but their production requires communication and converse between man and man.  The higher concepts cannot be derived from the individual Ego without a sensuously given Thou; the highest object of sense is man; man does not reach concepts and reason in general by himself, but only as one of two.  The nature of man is contained in community alone; only in life with others and for others does he attain his destiny and happiness.  The conscience is the ego putting itself in the place of another who has been injured.  Man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God, and God is love.