Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/221

218 must, so he affirms, start with man. Life, sensation, thought is something absolutely original, ingenious, incapable of being copied or transferred! Man must be conceived of as being at once spiritual and- corporeal, and the resulting problem is to find an Archimedian point between spiritualism and materialism.

c. Feuerbach had forcefully asserted the independence of ethics from religion already in his Pierre Bayle (1838). In The Essence of Christianity he refers to human love as the affection in which the unity of the race reveals itself in the individual. Later on he emphasized the individual desire for happiness, not however as purpose, but as fundamental principle: only those who know from personal experience what it is to suffer need and wrong can have sympathy with others. Ethics however knows of no striving for happiness in isolation. Nature itself has solved the problem of the transition from the egoistic desire for happiness to the recognition of duties towards others by the relation of the sexes to each other. The feelings of community and fellowship arise by virtue of the fact that the existence of the individual is shown to stand in the most intimate relation to the existence of other individuals.