Humanity to make the individual, the person, the centre of
thought. A strong individualistic and subjective feature, peculiar to
the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, favoured such a process.
Although in the case of Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling this feature had
never outstepped the limits of the purely comprehensible, yet such a
trait makes philosophy infer a similarly strongly developed feature of
individualism in the people, especially as at that time it was so
closely connected with popular life. Moreover, at that period there
was a great desire (as we see in Fichte and his influence on the
nation) to translate philosophy at once into action; and so it was not
remarkable that a thinker regardless of consequences should introduce
the idea of individualism into the field of action, and regard this
also as suitable for "concentration of thought upon this present
life." Herewith began a new epoch; just as formerly human thought had
proceeded from the individual up to the universal, so now it descended
from the highest generalisation down again to the individual; to the
process of getting free from self followed the regaining of self.

Here was the point at which an Anarchist philosophy could intervene,
and, as a matter of fact did intervene, in Stirner.

* * * * *

In another direction also, and about the same time, the critical
philosophy had reached a point beyond which it could not go without
attacking not only the changing forms, but also the very foundations
of all organisations of society which were then possible. However far
the Aufklaerer, the Encyclopaedists, the heedless fighters in the
political revolution, and the leading personages in the spiritual
revolution, had gone in their unsparing criticism of all institutions
and relationships of life, they had not as yet, except in a few
isolated cases, attacked Religion, the State, and Property, as such in
the abstract.

However manifold and transitory their various forms might be, these
three things themselves still seemed to be the incontrovertible and
necessary conditions of spiritual, political, and social life, merely
the different concrete formulae for the one absolute idea which could
not be banished from the thought of that age.

But if we approach these three fundamental ideas with the probe of
scientific criticism, and resolutely tear away the halo of the
absolute, it does not on that account seem necessary for us to