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anarchism--Bakunine has taken very much from him--and overtopped the sovereign power of consciousness with his sovereign power of the individual. We do not follow the decomposition of the Hegelian school on this side any further. What is more important for us is this: The mass of the most decided young Hegelians were driven back upon English-French materialism through the necessities of their fight against positive religion. Here they came into conflict with their school system. According to materialism, nature exists as the sole reality, it exists in the Hegelian system only as the alienation of the absolute Idea, as it were a degradation of the Idea; under all circumstances, thought, and its thought-product, the Idea, according to this view, appears as the original, nature, which only exists through the condescension of the Idea as the derived, and in this contradiction they got along as well or as ill as they might. Then came Feuerbach's "Wesen des Christenthums." With one blow it cut the contradiction, in that it placed materialism on the throne again without any circumlocution. Nature exists independently of all philosophies. It is the foundation upon which we, ourselves products of nature, are built. Outside man and nature nothing exists, and the higher beings which our religious phantasies have created are only the fantastic reflections of our individuality. The cord was broken, the system was scattered and destroyed, the contradiction, since it only existed in the imagination, was solved. One must himself have experienced the delivering power of this book to get a clear idea of it. The enthusiasm was universal, we were all for the moment followers of Feuerbach. How enthusiastically Marx greeted the new idea and how much he was influenced by it, in spite of all his critical reservations, one may read in the "Holy Family." The very faults of the book contributed to its momentary effect. The literary, impressive, even bombastic style secured for it a very large public and was a constant relief after the long years of abstract and abstruse Hegelianism. The same result also proceeded from the extravagant glorification of love, which in comparison with the insufferable sovereignty of pure reason, found an excuse, if not a justification. What we must not forget is, that just on these two weaknesses of Feuerbach "true Socialism" in educated Germany fastened itself like a spreading plague since 1844, and set liter
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