sufficiently obscured by the present-day manner of
writing history, without our needing to change these conflicts into a
mere appendix of ecclesiastical history. Here it is evident how far we
in our day are away from Feuerbach. His most beautiful passages in
praise of the new religion of love are today unreadable.

The only religion which Feuerbach examined closely is Christianity, the
universal religion of the western world which is founded upon
monotheism. He proves that the Christian God is only the fantastic
reflection, the reflected image of man. But that God is himself the
product of a lengthy process of abstraction, the concentrated
quintessence of the earlier tribal and national gods. And man also whose
reflection that God is, is not a real man, but is likewise the
quintessence of many real men, the abstract human, and therefore himself
again the creature of thought. The same Feuerbach who on each page
preaches sensation, diving into the concrete, the real, becomes
thoroughly abstract as soon as he begins to talk of more than mere
sensual intercourse between human beings.

Of this relationship only one side appeals to him, the moral, and
Feuerbach's astonishing lack of resources as compared with Hegel is
striking. The ethic or rather moral doctrine of the latter, is the
Philosophy of Right and embraces: 1, Abstract Right; 2, Morality; 3,
Moral Conduct, under which are again comprised: the family, bourgeois,
society, and the State. As the form is here idealistic, the content is
realistic. The entire scope of law, economy, politics, is therein,
besides ethics. With Feuerbach, it is just the reverse. He is realistic
in form; he begins with man, but the discussion has absolutely nothing
to do with the world in which this man lives, and so, instead of the
man, stands an abstract man, who preaches sermons concerning the
philosophy of religion. This man is not even the son of a mother; he has
developed from the God of the monotheistic religions. He does not live
in real historic conditions and the world of history. He comes into
relationship with other men, but each of the others is just as much an
abstraction as he himself is. In the "philosophy of religion" we had
still men and women, but in the "ethic" this final distinction vanishes.
At long intervals Feuerbach makes such statements as: "A man thinks
differently in a palace than in a hut." "When you have nothing in your
body to ward off hunger and misery, you hav