174 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



53. 



Philoso- 

 phical 

 criticism : 

 Feuerbach. 



54. 



Humanistic 

 interpreta- 

 tion of 

 Hegel. 



55. 



Another 

 interpreta- 

 tion. 



the philosophical foundations upon which they built 

 their constructive attempts. They lived, like so many 

 other of their contemporaries, under the spell of Hegelian 

 speculation; but this spell was to be broken, the very 

 foundations themselves, on which they built, were to 

 become the subject of a not less unsparing logical or 

 philosophical criticism. This process of philosophical 

 criticism culminated in the work of another disciple of 

 Hegel's: that of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72), whose 

 'Essence of Christianity ' (1841), followed (in 1845) by 

 his ' Essence of Religion,' produced in this line of criticism 

 a crisis similar to that produced by Strauss some years 

 earlier in historical criticism. If the Divine Being, 

 according to Hegel and Strauss, is not a person, but an 

 infinite process of personification, this means that the 

 Divine becomes identical with the Human, because in 

 human history alone do we meet with this process of 

 development. We are thus obliged to identify Divinity . 

 with Humanity : we are led to the religion of Humanity / 

 and to Feuerbach's definition of religion " as the relation ) 

 of Man to himself, i.e., to his own Being, but as if it( 

 were another Being." 



It is needless to remark that the Hegelian view was 

 capable of another and quite different interpretation. 

 The process of personification of the immanent spirit can 

 also be looked upon as the gradual manifestation in time 

 and history of the Divine Mind, which was there from 

 the beginning and only hidden to the human observer. 

 From this point of view the highest form of human life 

 and thought is not an analogue of the flower in which 

 the life of a plant is consummated and eventually 



