Page:Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov - Anarchism and Socialism - tr. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1906).pdf/39



If Stirner combats Feuerbach, the "immortal" Proudhon imitates Kant. "What Kant did some sixty years ago for religion, what he did earlier for certainty of certainties; what others before him had attempted to do for happiness or supreme good, the 'Voice of the People' proposes to do for the Government,” pompously declares is the "father of Anarchism." Let us examine his methods and their results.

According to Proudhon, before Kant, the believer and the philosopher moved "by an irresistible impulse," asked themselves, "What is God?" They then asked themselves "Which, of all religions, is the best?" "In fact, if there does exist a Being superior to Humanity, there must also exist a system of the relations between this Being and Humanity. What then is this system? The search for the best religion is the second step that the human mind takes in reason and in faith. Kant gave up these insoluble questions. He no longer asked himself what is God, and which is the best religion, he set about explaining the origin and development of the Idea of God; he undertook to work out the biography of this idea." And the results he attained were as great as they were unexpected. "What we seek, what we see, in God, as Malebranche said …. is our own Ideal, the pure essence of Humanity. …. The human soul does not become conscious of its Ego through premeditated contemplation, as the psychologists put it; the soul perceives something outside itself, as if it were a different Being face to face with itself, and it is this inverted image which it calls God. Thus morality, justice, order, law, are no longer things