nsisted in only two
things--religion and politics. He who laid the greatest stress upon the
Hegelian system, might be moderately conservative in both these
respects, while he who considered the dialectic method of the greatest
importance could belong to the extreme left in religious and political
affairs. Hegel himself, in spite of the frequent outbursts of
revolutionary wrath in his books, was inclined, on the whole, to the
conservative side. His system, rather than his method, had cost him the
hard thinking. At the end of the thirties, the division in the school
grew greater and greater. The left wing, the so-called Young Hegelians,
in their fight with the pious orthodox, abandoned little by little, that
marked philosophical reserve regarding the burning questions of the day,
which had up to that time secured for their teachings State toleration
and even protection, and as in 1840 orthodox pietism and absolutist
feudal reaction ascended the throne with Frederick William IV., open
partisanship became unavoidable. The fight was still maintained with
philosophical weapons, but no longer along abstract philosophical lines;
they went straight to deny the dominant religion and the existing state,
and although in the "Deutschen Jahrbuechern" the practical aims were
still put forward clothed in philosophical phraseology, the younger
Hegelian school threw off disguise in the "Rheinische Zeitung," as the
exponents of the philosophy of the struggling radicals, and used the
cloak of philosophy only to deceive the censorship.

But politics were at that time a very thorny field, and so the main
fight was directed against religion. But this was also, particularly
since 1840, indirectly a political fight. Strauss' "Leben Jesu,"
published in 1835, had given the first cause of offense. The theory
therein developed regarding the origin of the gospel myths Bruno Bauer
later dealt with, adding the additional proof that a whole series of
evangelical stories had been invented by their authors. The fight
between these two was carried on under a philosophical disguise, as a
battle of mind with matter; the question whether the marvellous stories
of the gospel came into being through an unconscious myth-creation in
the womb of society, or whether they were individually invented by the
evangelists broadened into the question whether in the history of the
race, mind or matter carried the real weight, and lastly came Stirner,
the prophet of modern