138 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



A suitable Philosophy of Rehgion closes the general 

 view. Religion, Diihring maintains, is really nothing 

 but the " Cosmic Emotion." Historic religions are 

 only superstitious misconceptions of this profound 

 pulse of the universe ; they are all to disappear, 

 as essentially worthless pseudo-philosophies. The 

 "society of the future" will neither worship nor 

 sublimely hope : the Philosophy of the Actual has 

 dispensed with immortality as well as with God. 

 For, to say nothing of the predestined catastrophe 

 of the universe, the individual consciousness must 

 cease at death. There is for conscious beings no 

 common basis in the cosmic whole of the Actual ; 

 each conscious being is a perfectly self-enclosed 

 circuit. Nor is there any individual basis of con- 

 sciousness except the body. An individual con- 

 sciousness is merely a definite "situation" — one 

 specific combination — of the world-atoms. Death 

 is its dissolution, and is therefore final extinction. 



The system which opened with such keen vigour 

 of theoretic purpose, and which, as contrasted with 

 Hartmann's, exhibits so many points of a higher, 

 firmer-knit, and subtler intelligence, has ended in a 

 moral atomism as it began in a physical — in utter 

 social dissolution. It is, however, only paying the 

 penalty of inadequacy in its theoretical principle. 

 Its root of irrationality is identical with the irrational 



