Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/616

 594 THE HEGELIAN LEFT. eye of the anatomist or chemist, yet with that of the philosopher. All our ideas spring from the senses, but their production requires communication and converse between man and man. The higher concepts cannot be derived from the individual Ego without a sensuously given Thou ; the highest object of sense is man ; man does not reach concepts and reason in general by himself, but only as one of two. The nature of man is contained in com- munity alone; only in life with others and for others does he attain his destiny and happiness. The conscience is the ego putting itself in the place of another who has been injured. Man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God, and God is love. 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 the- olog)' 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-conscious- ness, 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 wor- shiped 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 ob-