[Footnote 1:  Feuerbach was born at Landshut, studied at Heidelberg and Berlin, habilitated, 1828, at Erlangen, and lived, 1836-60, in the village of Bruckberg, not far from Bayreuth, and from 1860 until his death in Rechenberg, a suburb of Nuremberg. Collected Works in 10 vols., 1846-66.  The chief works are entitled:  P.  Bayle, 1838, 2d ed., 1844; Philosophy and Christianity, 1839; The Essence of Christianity, 1841, 4th ed., 1883 [English translation by George Eliot, 1854]; Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, 1843; The Essence of Religion, 1845; Theogony, 1857; God, Freedom, and Immortality, 1866.  Karl Gruen, 1874, C.N.  Starcke, 1885, and W. Bolin, 1891, treat of Feuerbach.]

To the philosophy of religion Feuerbach assigns the task of giving a psychological explanation of the genesis of religion, instead of showing reason in religion.  In bidding us believe in miracles dogma is a prohibition to think.  Hence the philosopher is not to justify it, but to uncover the illusion to which it owes its origin.  Speculative theology is an intoxicated philosophy; it is time to become sober, and to recognize that philosophy and religion are diametrically opposed to each other, that they are related to each other as health to disease, as thought to phantasy.  Religion arises from the fact that man objectifies his own true essence, and opposes it to himself as a personal being, without coming to a consciousness of this divestment of self, of the identity of the divine and human nature.  Hence the Hegelian principles, that the absolute is self-consciousness, that in man God knows himself, must be reversed:  self-consciousness is the absolute; in his God man knows himself only.  The Godhead is our own universal nature, freed from its individual limitations, intuited and worshiped as another, independent being, distinct from us.  God is self objectified, the inner nature of man expressed; man is the beginning, the middle, and the end of religion.  All theology is anthropology, for all religion is a self-deification of man.  In religion man makes a division in his own nature, posits himself as double, first as limited (as a human individual), then as unlimited, raised to infinity (as God); and this deified self he worships in order to obtain from it the satisfaction of his needs, which the course of the world leaves unmet.  Thus religion grows out of egoism:  its basis is the difference between our will and our power; its aim, to set us free from the dependence which we feel before nature. (Like culture, religion seeks to make nature an intelligible and compliant being, only that in this it makes use of the supernatural instruments faith, prayer, and magic; it is only gradually that men learn to attack the evils by natural means.) That which man himself is not, but wishes to be, that he represents to himself in his gods as existing; they are the wishes of man’s heart transformed into