. Starcke, 1885,
and W. Bolin, 1891, treat of Feuerbach.]

To the philosophy of religion Feuerbach assigns the task of giving a
psychological explanation of the genesis of religion, instead of showing
reason in religion. In bidding us believe in miracles dogma is a
prohibition to think. Hence the philosopher is not to justify it, but to
uncover the illusion to which it owes its origin. Speculative theology is
an intoxicated philosophy; it is time to become sober, and to recognize
that philosophy and religion are diametrically opposed to each other,
that they are related to each other as health to disease, as thought to
phantasy. Religion arises from the fact that man objectifies his own true
essence, and opposes it to himself as a personal being, without coming to a
consciousness of this divestment of self, of the identity of the divine
and human nature. Hence the Hegelian principles, that the absolute is
self-consciousness, that in man God knows himself, must be reversed:
self-consciousness is the absolute; in his God man knows himself only. The
Godhead is our own universal nature, freed from its individual limitations,
intuited and worshiped as another, independent being, distinct from us.
God is self objectified, the inner nature of man expressed; man is
the beginning, the middle, and the end of religion. All theology is
anthropology, for all religion is a self-deification of man. In religion
man makes a division in his own nature, posits himself as double, first as
limited (as a human individual), then as unlimited, raised to infinity (as
God); and this deified self he worships in order to obtain from it the
satisfaction of his needs, which the course of the world leaves unmet. Thus
religion grows out of egoism: its basis is the difference between our will
and our power; its aim, to set us free from the dependence which we feel
before nature. (Like culture, religion seeks to make nature an intelligible
and compliant being, only that in this it makes use of the supernatural
instruments faith, prayer, and magic; it is only gradually that men learn
to attack the evils by natural means.) That which man himself is not, but
wishes to be, that he represents to himself in his gods as existing; they
are the wishes of man's heart transformed into real beings, his longing
after happiness satisfied by the fancy. The same holds true of all dogmas:
as God is the affirmation of our wishes, so the world beyond is the present
embelli