anarchism--Bakunine has taken very much from
him--and overtopped the sovereign power of consciousness with his
sovereign power of the individual.

We do not follow the decomposition of the Hegelian school on this side
any further. What is more important for us is this: The mass of the most
decided young Hegelians were driven back upon English-French materialism
through the necessities of their fight against positive religion. Here
they came into conflict with their school system. According to
materialism, nature exists as the sole reality, it exists in the
Hegelian system only as the alienation of the absolute Idea, as it were
a degradation of the Idea; under all circumstances, thought, and its
thought-product, the Idea, according to this view, appears as the
original, nature, which only exists through the condescension of the
Idea as the derived, and in this contradiction they got along as well or
as ill as they might.

Then came Feuerbach's "Wesen des Christenthums." With one blow it cut
the contradiction, in that it placed materialism on the throne again
without any circumlocution. Nature exists independently of all
philosophies. It is the foundation upon which we, ourselves products of
nature, are built. Outside man and nature nothing exists, and the higher
beings which our religious phantasies have created are only the
fantastic reflections of our individuality. The cord was broken, the
system was scattered and destroyed, the contradiction, since it only
existed in the imagination, was solved. One must himself have
experienced the delivering power of this book to get a clear idea of it.
The enthusiasm was universal, we were all for the moment followers of
Feuerbach. How enthusiastically Marx greeted the new idea and how much
he was influenced by it, in spite of all his critical reservations, one
may read in the "Holy Family."

The very faults of the book contributed to its momentary effect. The
literary, impressive, even bombastic style secured for it a very large
public and was a constant relief after the long years of abstract and
abstruse Hegelianism. The same result also proceeded from the
extravagant glorification of love, which in comparison with the
insufferable sovereignty of pure reason, found an excuse, if not a
justification. What we must not forget is, that just on these two
weaknesses of Feuerbach "true Socialism" in educated Germany fastened
itself like a spreading plague since 1844, and set liter