any supposed or probable outcome of chance; Stirner and Proudhon
support each other mutually with all their independence, and with all
their difference one from another. As to this, it cannot be denied
that it is to be traced, first and foremost, to the totally different
environment in which the two authors grew up.

Ludwig Pfau, in a talented essay, has sought to derive the literary
peculiarities of Proudhon from the Gallic character and from his
French _milieu_. But even besides the purely literary aspect, Proudhon
shows all the gifts and all the weaknesses of his people and of his
time; he shares with all Frenchmen their small inclination to real
criticism, but also their faculty of never separating themselves from
the stream of practical life; and thus, before everything, we perceive
in Proudhon's earlier works a strong tendency towards the part of an
agitator. L. Pfau asserts that it is a specific peculiarity of the
French nation, with all their notorious sentiment for freedom, "to
discipline their own reluctant personality, and subject it to the
common interest"; and therein lies, perhaps, the reason why Proudhon,
although an enthusiastic advocate of personal freedom, never wished
this to be driven to the point of the disintegration of collective
unity and to the sacrifice of the idea of society.

Stirner is the German thinker who is carried away by the unchecked
flow of his thoughts far from the path of the actual life into a misty
region of "Cloud-cuckoo-land," where he actually remains as the "only
individual," because no one can follow him. There is no trace in
Stirner's book of any intention of being an agitator. As far as
political parties are mentioned in it, they do appear as such, but
merely as corollaries of certain tendencies of philosophic thought.
Stirner keeps himself even anxiously apart from politics, and a
certain dislike to them is unmistakable in him. All parties have in
his eyes only this in common, that they all strive to actualise
conceptions and ideas which lie beyond them, whether these be called
God, State, or humanity. Stirner stands in the same relation to the
philosophic tendencies of his own and earlier times. He sees them all
run into the great ocean of generality the absolute, nothingness. The
distinction between Saint Augustine and L. Feuerbach is for him purely
a superficial and not an essential one; for the "man" of the latter is
as foreign to him as the "God" of the former. And