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THE EGO AND HIS OWN

human " one so often, that one cannot feel tempted to
draw the sword against it again. And yet it has al-
most always been only moral opponents that have ap-
peared in the arena, to assail the supreme essence in
favor of--another supreme essence. So Proudhon, un-
abashed, says: * " Man is destined to live without
religion, but the moral law is eternal and absolute.
Who would dare to-day to attack morality ?" Moral
people skimmed off the best fat from religion, ate it
themselves, and are now having a tough job to get rid
of the resulting scrofula. If, therefore, we point out
that religion has not by any means been hurt in its
inmost part so long as people reproach it only with its
superhuman essence, and that it takes its final appeal
to the " spirit" alone (for God is spirit), then we
have sufficiently indicated its final accord with moral-
ity, and can leave its stubborn conflict with the latter
lying behind us. It is a question of a supreme essence
with both, and whether this is a superhuman or a
human one can make (since it is in any case an es-
sence over me, a super-mine one, so to speak) but little
difference to me. In the end the relation to the
human essence, or to " Man," as soon as ever it has
shed the snake-skin of the old religion, will yet wear a
religious snake-skin again.

So Feuerbach instructs us that, " if one only inverts

speculative philosophy, i. e. always makes the predi-
cate the subject, and so makes the subject the object
and principle, one has the undraped truth, pure and
clean." Herewith, to be sure, we lose the narrow

*" De la Création de l'Ordre" etc., p. 36.

" Anekdota," II, 64.

MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 61

religious standpoint, lose the God, who from this
standpoint is subject; but we take in "exchange for it
the other side of the religious standpoint, the moral
standpoint. E. g., we no longer say " God is love,"
but " Love is divine." If we further put in place of
the predicate " divine " the equivalent " sacred," then,
as far as concerns the sense, all the old comes back
again. According to this, love is to be the good in
man, his divineness, that which does him honor, his
true humanity (it " makes him Man for the first
time," makes for the first time a man out of him).
So then it would be more accurately worded thus:
Love is what is human in man, and what is inhuman
is the loveless egoist. But precisely all that which
Christianity and with it speculative philosophy (i. e.
theology) offers as the good, the absolute, is to self-
ownership simply not the good (or, what means the
same, it is only the good). Consequently, by the
transformation of the predicate into the subject, the
Christian essence (and it is the predicate that contains
the essence, you know) would only be fixed yet more
oppressively. God and the divine would entwine
themselves all the more inextricably with me. To
expel God from his heaven and to rob him of his
" transcendence " cannot yet support a claim of com-
plete victory, if therein he is only chased into the hu-
man breast and gifted with indelible immanence.
Now they say, " The divine is the truly human ! "

The same people who oppose Christianity as the ba-

sis of the State, i. e. oppose the so-called Christian
State, do not tire of repeating that morality is " the
fundamental pillar of social life and of the State."