this Being outside of him as God, or find it in him and call it the
'Being of Mankind' or 'Man.' _I_ am neither God nor Man, neither the
highest Being, nor my own Being, and therefore it is essentially a
matter of indifference if I imagine this Being in myself or outside
myself. And, indeed, we do always imagine the highest being in the two
future states, in the internal and external at once; for the 'Spirit of
God' is, according to the Christian conception, also 'our spirit' and
'dwells within us.' It dwells in heaven and dwells in us; but we poor
things are but its 'dwelling-place,' and if Feuerbach destroys its
heavenly dwelling-place and forces it to come down to us bag and
baggage, we, its earthly abode, will find ourselves very
over-crowded."[9]

To escape the inconveniences of such over-crowding, to avoid being
dominated by any spook, to at last place our foot upon actual ground,
there is but one way: to take as our starting-point the only real being,
our own Ego, "Away then with everything that is not wholly and solely my
own affair! You think my own concerns must at least be 'good ones?' A
fig for good and evil! I am I, and I am neither good nor evil. Neither
has any meaning for me. The godly is the affair of God, the human that
of humanity. My concern is neither the Godly nor the Human, is not the
True, the Good, the Right, the Free, etc., but simply my own self, and
it is not general, it is individual, as I myself am individual. For me
there is nothing above myself."[10]

Religion, conscience, morality, right, law, family, state, are but so
many fetters forced upon me in the name of an abstraction, but so many
despotic lords whom "I," the individual conscious of my own "concerns,"
combat by every means in my power. Your "_morality_," not merely the
morality of the bourgeois philistines, but the most elevated, the most
humanitarian morality is only religion which has changed its supreme
beings. Your "_right_," that you believe born with man, is but a ghost,
and if you respect it, you are no farther advanced than the heroes of
Homer who were afraid when they beheld a god fighting in the ranks of
their enemies. Right is might. "Whoever has might, he has right; if you
have not the former you have not the latter. Is this wisdom so difficult
of attainment?"[11] You would persuade me to sacrifice my interests to
those of the State. I, on the contrary, declare war to the knife to all
States, even the most democrati