terminology is that of our author) are
wrong to complain of it, since it is not the rich who create the poverty
of the poor, but the poor who create the wealth of the rich. They ought
to blame themselves then if their condition is a hard one. In order to
change it they have only to revolt against the rich; as soon as they
seriously wish it, they will be the strongest and the reign of wealth
will be at an end. Salvation lies in struggle, and not in fruitless
appeals to the generosity of the oppressors. Stirner, therefore,
preaches the class war. It is true that he represents it in the abstract
form of the struggle of a certain number of egoist "Egos" against
another smaller number of "Egos" not less egoist. But here we come to
another merit of Stirner's.

According to Taillandier, he has spoken the last word of the young
atheist school of German philosophers. As a matter of fact he has only
spoken the last word of idealist speculation. But that word he has
incontestably the merit of having spoken.

In his criticism of religion Feuerbach is but half a Materialist. In
worshipping God, man only worships his own Being idealised. This is
true. But religions spring up and die out, like everything else upon
earth. Does this not prove that the human Being is not immutable, but
changes in the process of the historical evolution of societies?
Clearly, yes. But, then, what is the cause of the historical
transformation of the "human Being?" Feuerbach does not know. For him
the human Being is only an abstract notion, as human Nature was for the
French Materialists. This is the fundamental fault of his criticism of
religion. Stirner said that it had no very robust constitution. He
wished to strengthen it by making it breathe the fresh air of reality.
He turns his back upon all phantoms, upon all things of the imagination.
In reality, he said to himself, these are only individuals. Let us take
the individual for our starting-point. But _what_ individual does he
take for his starting-point? Tom, Dick, or Harry? Neither. He takes the
_individual in general_--he takes a new abstraction, the thinnest of
them all--he takes the "Ego."

Stirner naively imagined that he was finally solving an old
philosophical question, which had already divided the Nominalists and
the Realists of the Middle Ages. "No Idea has an existence," he says,
"for none is capable of becoming corporeal. The scholastic controversy
of Realism and Nominalism had the sa