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138 A suitable Philosophy of Religion closes the general view. Religion, Dühring maintains, is really nothing but the “Cosmic Emotion.” Historic religions are only superstitious misconceptions of this profound pulse of the universe; they are all to disappear, as essentially worthless pseudo-philosophies. The “society of the future” will neither worship nor sublimely hope: the Philosophy of the Actual has dispensed with immortality as well as with God. For, to say nothing of the predestined catastrophe of the universe, the individual consciousness must cease at death. There is for conscious beings no common basis in the cosmic whole of the Actual; each conscious being is a perfectly self-enclosed circuit. Nor is there any individual basis of consciousness except the body. An individual consciousness is merely a definite “situation” — one specific combination — of the world-atoms. Death is its dissolution, and is therefore final extinction.

The system which opened with such keen vigour of theoretic purpose, and which, as contrasted with Hartmann’s, exhibits so many points of a higher, firmer-knit, and subtler intelligence, has ended in a moral atomism as it began in a physical — in utter social dissolution. It is, however, only paying the penalty of inadequacy in its theoretical principle. Its root of irrationality is identical with the irrational