Ego, all the while being anxious that it should not return again to
the region of metaphysical soap-bubbles, and leave its psychological
and practical sphere. On the contrary, Stirner appears to be rather
inclined to Positivism, and to consider the details of life and of
perception as real, and as the only ones whose existence is justified.
All that is comprehensible and general is secondary, a product of the
individual, the subject turned into an object, a creation that is
looked upon and honoured by the creator as the only actual reality,
the highest end--indeed, as something sacred. In the origin of this
generalisation, as well as in emancipation from it, Stirner perceives
the course of progressive culture.

The ancients only got so far as generalisations of the lower order;
they lived in the feeling that the world and worldly relationships
(for example, the natural bond of blood) were the only true things
before which their powerless self must bow down. Man, in the view
of life taken by the ancient world, lived entirely in the region of
perception, and therefore all his general ideas, even the highest type
of them, not excluding Plato's, retained a strongly sensuous
character.

Christianity only went a step higher with its generalisations out
of the region of the senses; ideas became more spiritual and less
corporeal in proportion as they became more general. Antiquity sought
the true pleasure of life, enjoyment of life; Christianity sought the
true life; antiquity sought complete sensuousness, Christianity
complete morality and spirituality; the first a happy life here,
the latter a happy life hereafter; antiquity postulated as the
highest moral basis, the State, the laws of the world; Christianity
postulated God, imperishable, everlasting Law. The ancient world
did not get beyond the rule of formal reason, the Sophists;
Christianity put the heart in the place of reason, and cultivation
of sentiment in that of one-sided cultivation of the intellect.
Nevertheless, this is, according to Stirner (as has already been
mentioned), the same process, the objectivisation of the Self, which
comes out of itself, and considers itself as some foreign body
striving upwards--unconscious self-deification.

Even in the Reformation Stirner recognises nothing more than the
continuation of the same process. Up to the time of the period
preceding the Reformation, reason, that was condemned as heathenish,
lay under the dominion of