ss.
Christianity dualistically tears apart body and soul, time and eternity,
the world and God; we need no Creator, for the life-process has neither
beginning nor end. The world is framed for the highest reason, it is true,
but it has not been framed by a highest reason. Our highest Idea is the
All, which is conformed to law, and instinct with life and reason, and
our feeling toward the universe--the consciousness of dependence on its
laws--exercises no less of ethical influence, is no less full of reverence,
and no less exposed to injury from an irreverent pessimism, than the
feeling of the devout of the old type toward their God. Hence the answer
to the second question "Have we still a religion?" maybe couched in the
affirmative. The new faith does not need a _cultus_ and a Church. Since the
dry services of the free congregations offer nothing for the fancy and the
spirit, the edification of the heart must be accomplished in other ways--by
participation in the interests of humanity, in the national life, and,
not last, by aesthetic enjoyment. Thus in his last work, which in two
appendices reaches a discussion of the great German poets and musicians,
the old man returns to a thought to which he had given earlier expression,
that the religious _cultus_ should be replaced by the _cultus_ of genius.

[Footnote 1: English translation by Mathilde Blind, 1873.]

As Strauss went over from Hegelianism to pantheism, so Ludwig Feuerbach[1]
(1804-72), a son of the great jurist, Anselm Feuerbach, after he had for
a short time moved in the same direction, took the opposite, the
individualistic course, only, like Strauss, to end at last in materialism.
"My first thought," as he himself describes the course of his development,
"was God; my second, reason; my third and last, man." As theology has been
overcome by Hegel's philosophy of reason, so this in turn must give place
to the philosophy of man. "The new philosophy makes man, including nature
as his basis, the highest and sole subject of philosophy, and,
consequently, anthropology the universal science." Only that which is
immediately self-evident is true and divine. But only that which is
sensible is evident (_sonnenklar)_; it is only where sensibility begins
that all doubt and conflict cease. Sensible beings alone are true, real
beings; existence in space and time is alone existence; truth, reality,
and sensibility are identical. While the old philosophy took for its
starting po