dogma; shortly before the Reformation,
however, it was said, "If only the heart remains Christianly minded,
reason may after all have its way." But the Reformation at last places
the heart in a more serious position, and since then hearts have
become visibly less Christian. When men began with Luther "to take the
matter to heart," this step of the Reformation led to the heart being
lightened from the heavy burden of Christianity. The heart becomes
from day to day less Christian; it loses the contents with which it
occupies itself, until at last nothing remains to it but empty
"heartiness," general love of man, the love of humanity, the
consciousness of freedom. It need hardly be mentioned that this view
of history is quite arbitrary and distorted. Who requires to be told
that the Reformation was, perhaps, the greatest historical act in
favour of the individual, because it freed him from the most powerful
of all authorities, from the omnipotence of the Roman dogma? With the
Reformation the conscious movement for freedom received its first
great impulse.

But Stirner places the reverence of the ancients for the State, the
reverence of the Christian for God, and of modern times for humanity
and freedom, all upon the same level,--they all seem to him ghosts,
spectres, possession by spirits and hauntings,--and he seeks to
establish the same conclusion as regards the ideas of truth, right,
morality, property, and love,--the so-called sacred foundations of
human society. They are all ghost-imaginations of our own mind,
creations of our own Ego, before which the creator of them bows in the
impotence of ignorance, considering them as something unalterable,
eternal, and sacred, to which every activity of the creative idea is
placed in contrast as Egoism.

"Men have got something into their heads which they think ought to be
actualised. They have ideas of love, goodness, and so on, which they
would like to see realised; and therefore they wish for a kingdom of
love upon earth in which no one acts out of self-interest, but
everyone from love. Love shall rule. But what they have placed in
their heads, how can it be called other than 'a fixed idea' (_idee
fixe_)? Their heads are haunted by spectres. The most persistently
haunting spectre is Man himself. Remember the proverb, 'The way to
ruin is paved with good intentions.' The proposal to actualise
humanity in itself, to become wholly human, is of just the same
disastrous charact