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THE EGO AND HIS OWN

dwells in the other world, i, e. is God.

But from this it also appears how thoroughly theo-

logical is the liberation that Feuerbach* is laboring to
give us. What he says is that we had only mistaken
our own essence, and therefore looked for it in the
other world, but that now, when we see that God was
only our human essence, we must recognize it again as
ours and move it back out of the other world into this.
To God, who is spirit, Feuerbach gives the name
" Our Essence." Can we put up with this, that " Our
Essence " is brought into opposition to us,--that we
are split into an essential and an unessential self ?
Do we not therewith go back into the dreary misery
of seeing ourselves banished out of ourselves ?

What have we gained, then, when for a variation

we have transferred into ourselves the divine outside
us ? Are we that which is in us ? As little as we are
that which is outside us. I am as little my heart as I
am my sweetheart, this " other self " of mine. Just
because we are not the spirit that dwells in us, just for
that reason we had to take it and set it outside us; it
was not we, did not coincide with us, and therefore we
could not think of it as existing otherwise than outside
us, on the other side from us, in the other world.

With the strength of despair Feuerbach clutches at

the total substance of Christianity, not to throw it
away, no, to drag it to himself, to draw it, the long-
yearned-for, ever-distant, out of its heaven with a last
effort, and keep it by him forever. Is not that a
clutch of the uttermost despair, a clutch for life or

* " Essence of Christianity."

MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 41

death, and is it not at the same time the Christian
yearning and hungering for the other world ? The
hero wants not to go into the other world, but to draw
the other world to him, and compel it to become this
world ! And since then has not all the world, with
more or less consciousness, been crying that " this
world " is the vital point, and heaven must come down
on earth and be experienced even here ?

Let us, in brief, set Feuerbach's theological view

and our contradiction over against each other !
"The essence of man is man's supreme being; * now
by religion, to be sure, the supreme being is called
God and regarded as an objective essence, but in truth
it is only man's own essence; and therefore the turn-
ing point of the world's history is that henceforth
no longer God, but man, is to appear to man as
God."

To this we reply: The supreme being is indeed the

essence of man, but, just because it is his essence and
not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we
see it outside him and view it as " God," or find it in
him and call it " Essence of Man " or " Man." I am
neither God nor Man, neither the supreme essence
nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main
whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me.
Nay, we really do always think of the supreme being
as in both kinds of otherworldliness, the inward and

* [Or, " highest essence " The Word Wesen, which means both " es-
sence " and " being," will be translated now one way and now the other in
the following pages. The reader must bear in mind that these two words
are identical in German, and so are " supreme " and " highest "]

Cf. e. g. " Essence of Christianity," p 402.

[That is, the abstract conception of man, as in the preceding sentence.]