shed and idealized by the fancy. Instead of "God is merciful, is
love, is omnipotent, he performs miracles and hears prayers," the statement
must be reversed: mercy, love, omnipotence, to perform miracles, and to
hear prayers, is divine. In the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's supper
Feuerbach sees the truth that water and food are indispensable and divine.
As Feuerbach, following out this naturalistic tendency, reached the extreme
of materialism, the influence of his philosophy--whose different phases
there is no occasion to trace out in detail--had already passed its
culmination. From his later writings little more has found its way into
public notice than the pun, that man is (_ist_) what he eats (_isst_).

The remaining members of the Hegelian left may be treated more briefly.
Bruno Bauer[1] (died in 1882; his principal work is the _Critique of the
Synoptics_, in three volumes, 1841-42, which had been preceded, in 1840, by
a _Critique of the Evangelical History of John_) at first belonged on the
right of the school, but soon went over to the extreme left. He explains
the Gospel narratives as creations with a purpose (_Tendenzdichtungen_),
as intentional, but not deceitful, inventions, from which, despite their
unreality, history may well be learned, inasmuch as they reflect the spirit
of the time in which they were constructed. His own publications and those
of his brother Edgar are much more radical after the year 1844. In these
the brothers advocate the standpoint of "pure or absolute criticism," which
extends itself to all things and events for or against which sides are
taken from any quarter, and calmly watches how everything destroys
itself. As soon as anything is admitted, it is no longer true. Nothing is
absolutely valid, all is vain; it is only the criticising, all-destroying
ego, free from all ethical ties, that possesses truth.

[Footnote 1: Not to be confused with the head of the Tuebingen School,
Ferdinand Christian Baur (died 1860).]

One further step was possible beyond Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, that from
the community to the particular, selfish individual, from the criticising,
therefore thinking, ego, to the ego of sensuous enjoyment. This step was
taken in that curious book _The Individual and his Property_, which Kaspar
Schmidt, who died in 1856 at Berlin, published in 1845 (2d ed., 1882),
under the pseudonym of Max Stirner. The Individual of whom the title speaks
is the egoist. For me nothin