ary phrases in
the place of scientific knowledge, the freeing of mankind by means of
love in place of the emancipation of the proletariat, through the
economic transformation of production, in short lost itself in nauseous
fine writing and in sickly sentimentality, of the type of which class of
writers was Herr Karl Gruen.

We must furthermore not forget that though the Hegelian school was
destroyed the Hegelian philosophy was not critically vanquished. Strauss
and Bauer took each a side and engaged in polemics. Feuerbach broke
through the system and threw it as a whole aside. But one has not
finished with a philosophy by simply declaring it to be false, and so
enormous a work as the Hegelian philosophy which has had so tremendous
an influence upon the mental development of the nation did not allow
itself to be put aside peremptorily. It had to be destroyed in its own
way, which means in the way that critically destroys its form but saves
the new acquisitions to knowledge won by it. How this was brought about
we shall see below.

But for the moment, the Revolution of 1848 put aside all philosophical
discussion just as unceremoniously as Feuerbach laid aside Hegel. And
then Feuerbach was himself crowded out.

II.

The great foundation question of all, especially new, philosophies is
connected with the relation between thinking and being. Since very early
times when men, being in complete ignorance respecting their own bodies,
and stirred by apparitions,[1] arrived at the idea that thought and
sensation were not acts of their own bodies, but of a special soul
dwelling in the body and deserting it at death, ever since then they
have been obliged to give thought to the relations of this soul to the
outside world. If it betook itself from the body and lived on, there was
no reason to invent another death for it; thus arose the conception of
their immortality, which, at that evolutionary stage, did not appear as
a consolation, but as fate, against which a man cannot strive, and often
enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. Not religious
desire for consolation but uncertainty arising from a similar universal
ignorance of what to associate with the soul when once it was
acknowledged, after the death of the body, led universally to the
tedious idea of personal immortality. Just in a similar fashion the
first gods arose, through the personification of the forces of nature,
and these in the further deve