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THE EGO AND HIS OWN

outward, at once; for the " Spirit of God " is, accord-
ing to the Christian view, also " our spirit," and
" dwells in us."* It dwells in heaven and dwells in
us; we poor things are just its "dwelling," and, if
Feuerbach goes on to destroy its heavenly dwelling
and force it to move to us bag and baggage, then we,
its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded.

But after this digression (which, if we were at all

proposing to work by line and level, we should have
had to save for later pages in order to avoid repeti-
tion) we return to the spirit's first creation, the spirit
itself.

The spirit is something other than myself. But

this other, what is it ?

§ 2.--T

OSSESSED

Have you ever seen a spirit ? " No, not I, but my

grandmother." Now, you see, it's just so with me
too; I myself haven't seen any, but my grandmother
had them running between her feet all sorts of ways,
and out of confidence in our grandmothers' honesty
we believe in the existence of spirits.

But had we no grandfathers then, and did they not

shrug their shoulders every time our grandmothers
told about their ghosts ? Yes, those were unbelieving
men who have harmed our good religion much, those
rationalists ! We shall feel that ! What else lies
at the bottom of this warm faith in ghosts, if not the
faith in " the existence of spiritual beings in general,"
and is not this latter itself disastrously unsettled if

* E g , Rom 8 9,1 Cor, 3, 16, John 20, 22, and innumerable other passages.

MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 43

saucy men of the understanding may disturb the
former ? The Romanticists were quite conscious what
a blow the very belief in God suffered by the laying
aside of the belief in spirits or ghosts, and they tried
to help us out of the baleful consequences not only by
their reawakened fairy world, but at last, and
especially, by the " intrusion of a higher world," by
their somnambulists, prophetesses of Prevorst, etc.
The good believers and fathers of the church did not
suspect that with the belief in ghosts the foundation
of religion was withdrawn, and that since then it had
been floating in the air. He who no longer believes
in any ghost needs only to travel on consistently in
his unbelief to see that there is no separate being at
all concealed behind things, no ghost or--what is
naively reckoned as synonymous even in our use of
words--no "spirit."

" Spirits exist ! " Look about in the world, and

say for yourself whether a spirit does not gaze upon
you out of everything. Out of the lovely little flower
there speaks to you the spirit of the Creator, who has
shaped it so wonderfully; the stars proclaim the spirit
that established their order; from the mountain-tops a
spirit of sublimity breathes down ; out of the waters a
spirit of yearning murmurs up; and--out of men mil-
lions of spirits speak. The mountains may sink, the
flowers fade, the world of stars fall in ruins, the men
die--what matters the wreck of these visible bodies ?
The spirit, the " invisible spirit," abides eternally !

Yes, the whole world is haunted ! Only is

haunted ? Nay, it itself " walks," it is uncanny
through and through, it is the wandering seeming-