real beings, his longing after happiness satisfied by the fancy.  The same holds true of all dogmas:  as God is the affirmation of our wishes, so the world beyond is the present embellished and idealized by the fancy.  Instead of “God is merciful, is love, is omnipotent, he performs miracles and hears prayers,” the statement must be reversed:  mercy, love, omnipotence, to perform miracles, and to hear prayers, is divine.  In the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s supper Feuerbach sees the truth that water and food are indispensable and divine.  As Feuerbach, following out this naturalistic tendency, reached the extreme of materialism, the influence of his philosophy—­whose different phases there is no occasion to trace out in detail—­had already passed its culmination.  From his later writings little more has found its way into public notice than the pun, that man is (ist) what he eats (isst).

The remaining members of the Hegelian left may be treated more briefly.  Bruno Bauer[1] (died in 1882; his principal work is the Critique of the Synoptics, in three volumes, 1841-42, which had been preceded, in 1840, by a Critique of the Evangelical History of John) at first belonged on the right of the school, but soon went over to the extreme left.  He explains the Gospel narratives as creations with a purpose (Tendenzdichtungen), as intentional, but not deceitful, inventions, from which, despite their unreality, history may well be learned, inasmuch as they reflect the spirit of the time in which they were constructed.  His own publications and those of his brother Edgar are much more radical after the year 1844.  In these the brothers advocate the standpoint of “pure or absolute criticism,” which extends itself to all things and events for or against which sides are taken from any quarter, and calmly watches how everything destroys itself.  As soon as anything is admitted, it is no longer true.  Nothing is absolutely valid, all is vain; it is only the criticising, all-destroying ego, free from all ethical ties, that possesses truth.

[Footnote 1:  Not to be confused with the head of the Tuebingen School, Ferdinand Christian Baur (died 1860).]

One further step was possible beyond Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, that from the community to the particular, selfish individual, from the criticising, therefore thinking, ego, to the ego of sensuous enjoyment.  This step was taken in that curious book The Individual and his Property, which Kaspar Schmidt, who died in 1856 at Berlin, published in 1845 (2d ed., 1882), under the pseudonym of Max Stirner.  The Individual of whom the title speaks is the egoist.  For me nothing is higher than myself; I use men and use up the world for my own pleasure.  I seek to be and have all that I can be and have; I have a right to all that is within my power.  Morality is a delusion, justice, like all Ideas, a phantom.  Those who believe in ideals, and worship such generalities as self-consciousness, man, society, are still deep in the mire of prejudice and superstition, and have banished the old orthodox phantom of the Deity only to replace it by a new one.  Nothing whatever is to be respected.