in this
period, a compulsory motive for all poetry. The existing positive
religions have limited themselves in this matter to the bestowal of
complete consecration upon the State regulation of sexual love, and
might completely disappear tomorrow without the least difference taking
place in the matter of love and friendship. Thus the Christian religion
in France was, as a matter of fact, so completely overthrown between the
years 1793 and 1798, that Napoleon himself could not re-introduce it
without opposition and difficulty, without, in the interval, any desire
for a substitute, in Feuerbach's sense, making itself felt.

Feuerbach's idealism consists in this, that he does not simply take for
granted the mutual and reciprocal feelings of men for one another such
as sexual love, friendship, compassion, self-sacrifice, etc., but
declares that they would come to their full realization for the first
time as soon as they were consecrated under the name of religion. The
main fact for him is not that these purely human relations exist, but
that they will be conceived of as the new true religion. They will be
fully realized for the first time if they are stamped as religions.
Religion is derived from "religare" and means originally "fastening."
Therefore, every bond between men is religion. Such etymological
artifices are the last resort of the idealistic philosophy. Not what the
word means according to the historical development of its true
significance, but what it should mean according to its derivation is
what counts, and so sex-love and the intercourse between the sexes is
consecrated as a "religion" only so that the word religion, which is
dear to the mind of the idealist, shall not vanish from the language.
The Parisian reformer of the stripe of Louis Blanc used to speak just in
the same way in the forties, for they could only conceive of a man
without religion as a monster, and used to say to us "Atheism, then, is
your religion."

If Feuerbach wants to place true religion upon the basis of real
materialistic philosophy, that would be just the same as conceiving of
modern chemistry as true alchemy. If religion can exist without its God
then alchemy can exist without its philosopher's stone. There exists, by
the way, a very close connection between alchemy and religion. The
philosopher's stone has many properties of the old gods, and the
Egyptian-Greek alchemists of the first two centuries of our era have had
their hands