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 596 THE TH EI STIC SCHOOL. 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 advo- cate 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 ad- mitted, 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. 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. Among the opponents of the Hegelian philosophy the members of the " theistic school," who have above (p. 589) been designated as semi-Hegelians, approximate it most closely. These endeavor, in part retaining the dialectic method, to blend the immanence of the absolute, which philosophy cannot give up and concerning which Hegel had erred only by way of over-emphasis, with the transcend- ence of God demanded by Christian consciousness, to estab- lish a theism which shall contain pantheism asa moment in itself. God is present in all creatures, yet distinct from them ; he is intramundane as well as extramundane; he is