so Stirner carries
his disinclination to politics, as being inimical to the philosophy of
his time, almost to disgust, being herein a genuine son of his country
and of his period.

Upon the philosophic exaltation and the speculative "foundation
period" of the beginning of the century there had followed a severe
depression; to the over-eager expectations which had been placed in
philosophy there followed just as severe a disappointment; to the
metaphysical orgy there followed a moral headache, which might be
designated not inaptly by the motto which Schopenhauer gave in mockery
to Feuerbach's philosophy, so well suited to his time--

"Edite, bibite, collegiales!
Post multa saecula
Pocula nulla."

The political attitude of the forties was very much the same. The
national enthusiasm, the wars of freedom, and the sanguine hopes which
had attended the downfall of the Corsican, had, like the expectations
aroused by the Revolutionists of the days of July, ended in miserable
disaster. The touching confidence which a nation, all too naive in
politics, had placed in its princes had been shamefully deceived and
abused. All dreams of union and freedom seemed to be extinguished for
a long time, and the flunkeyism which was unfortunately only too
rampant in the nation, ran riot, while frank souls stood aside in
disgust. The more eager the spiritual enthusiasm had been on the
threshold of two centuries, the deeper now did apathy weigh upon men's
spirits in the period of the forties. The fuller men's souls had been
of surging and stormy ideals, and wishings and vague longings of all
kinds, the emptier did they now become, and not only Stirner could
with justice give to his "only individual" the motto, "I have placed
my all on nothing," but it was the motto of all Germany at that time.
And yet in one thing Stirner is the type of his people as contrasted
with Proudhon. He is the most complete example of the German who lacks
that proud self-sacrificing view of the life of the community, that
feeling of the inseparability of the individual from the mass of his
people--which is the token of the French,--but who at all times has
suffered from a separatism that destroys everything. He is the typical
representative of that nation to whom its best sons have denied the
capacity of being a nation, but which has therefore been able to
produce more striking individualities than all other civilised nations
of the time.

*