I am not examining the doctrines of Hegel with reference to the history of metaphysics, and within the precincts of the school in which it occupies a large place and demands the most serious attention; I am tracing the influence of those doctrines on the public mind at large.  This influence is visible in the most disastrous consequences of atheism.  “It certainly is not the Hegelian school alone,” says M. Saint-Rene Taillandier, “which has produced all the moral miseries of the nineteenth century, all those unbridled desires, all those revolts of matter in a fury;[56] but it sums them all up in its formulae, it gives them, by its scientific way of representing them, a pernicious authority, it multiplies them by an execrable propaganda."[57]

It was through Feuerbach principally that the evolution was to be brought about which has led the Hegelian system, severely idealistic in its commencement, to favor at length the revolts of matter run mad.  And this evolution is only natural after all.  If the universe is the development of an idea, and not the work of an intelligent Will, all is necessary in the world, for the development of an idea is a matter of destiny.  Where all is necessary, all is legitimate:  the desires of the flesh as well as the laws of thought and of conscience.  But, from the moment that the flesh is emancipated, it aims at absolute empire, and ends by obtaining it:  this is matter of fact.  Feuerbach has put atheism into a definite shape, and disengaged it from all obscurity.  There exists no other infinite than the infinite in our thoughts; above us there exists nothing; no law which binds us, no power which governs us:  the work of modern science is to set man free from God, for God is an idol.  But man thus set free from all bonds and from all duty is not, for Feuerbach, the individual, but humanity.  The individual owes himself to his species; “the true sage will make no more silly and fantastic sacrifices, but he will never refuse sacrifices which are really serviceable to humanity."[58]

Here then is still a bond, a religion, and sacrifices; the emancipation is incomplete.  What is this humanity to which man owes himself?  An abstraction, an idol still, an idol to be overthrown if he would obtain perfect independence.  Listen to the German Stirmer, deducing from the doctrine its extreme consequences:  “Perish the people,” he exclaims, “perish Germany, perish all the nations of Europe; and let man, rid of all bonds, delivered from the last phantoms of religion, recover at length his full independence!"[59] All the mists of abstraction have now disappeared:  here we are on ground which is hideously clear.  Humanity is no longer in question, but the worship of self; it is the complete enfranchisement of selfishness.