Part 4 (1/2)

Thus its creations make it spirit, and by its creatures we know it, the creator; in them it lives, they are its world.

Now, what is the spirit? It is the creator of a spiritual world! Even in you and me people do not recognize spirit till they see that we have appropriated to ourselves something spiritual,--_i. e._, though thoughts may have been set before us, we have at least brought them to life in ourselves; for, as long as we were children, the most edifying thoughts might have been laid before us without our wis.h.i.+ng, or being able to reproduce them in ourselves. So the spirit also exists only when it creates something spiritual; it is real only together with the spiritual, its creature.

As, then, we know it by its works, the question is what these works are.

But the works or children of the spirit are nothing else but--spirits:

If I had before me Jews, Jews of the true metal, I should have to stop here and leave them standing before this mystery as for almost two thousand years they have remained standing before it, unbelieving and without knowledge. But, as you, my dear reader, are at least not a full-blooded Jew,--for such a one will not go astray as far as this,--we will still go along a bit of road together, till perhaps you too turn your back on me because I laugh in your face.

If somebody told you you were altogether spirit, you would take hold of your body and not believe him, but answer: ”I _have_ a spirit, no doubt, but do not exist only as spirit, but am a man with a body.” You would still distinguish _yourself_ from ”your spirit.” ”But,” replies he, ”it is your destiny, even though now you are yet going about in the fetters of the body, to be one day a 'blessed spirit,' and, however you may conceive of the future aspect of your spirit, so much is yet certain, that in death you will put off this body and yet keep yourself, _i. e._ your spirit, for all eternity; accordingly your spirit is the eternal and true in you, the body only a dwelling here below, which you may leave and perhaps exchange for another.”

Now you believe him! For the present, indeed, _you_ are not spirit only; but, when you emigrate from the mortal body, as one day you must, then you will have to help yourself without the body, and therefore it is needful that you be prudent and care in time for your proper self. ”What should it profit a man if he gained the whole world and yet suffered damage in his soul?”

But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course of time against the tenets of the Christian faith, have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenet undisturbed, and still ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the spirit is your better part, and that the spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else. Despite all your atheism, in zeal against _egoism_ you concur with the believers in immortality.

But whom do you think of under the name of egoist? A man who, instead of living to an idea,--_i. e._ a spiritual thing--and sacrificing to it his personal advantage, serves the latter. A good patriot, _e. g._, brings his sacrifice to the altar of the fatherland; but it cannot be disputed that the fatherland is an idea, since for beasts incapable of mind,[13]

or children as yet without mind, there is no fatherland and no patriotism. Now, if any one does not approve himself as a good patriot, he betrays his egoism with reference to the fatherland. And so the matter stands in innumerable other cases: he who in human society takes the benefit of a prerogative sins egoistically against the idea of equality; he who exercises dominion is blamed as an egoist against the idea of liberty,--etc.

You despise the egoist because he puts the spiritual in the background as compared with the personal, and has his eyes on himself where you would like to see him act to favor an idea. The distinction between you is that he makes himself the central point, but you the spirit; or that you cut your ident.i.ty in two and exalt your ”proper self,” the spirit, to be ruler of the paltrier remainder, while he will hear nothing of this cutting in two, and pursues spiritual and material interests just _as he pleases_. You think, to be sure, that you are falling foul of those only who enter into no spiritual interest at all, but in fact you curse at everybody who does not look on the spiritual interest as his ”true and highest” interest. You carry your knightly service for this beauty so far that you affirm her to be the only beauty of the world.

You live not to _yourself_, but to your _spirit_ and to what is the spirit's--_i. e._ ideas.

As the spirit exists only in its creating of the spiritual, let us take a look about us for its first creation. If only it has accomplished this, there follows thenceforth a natural propagation of creations, as according to the myth only the first human beings needed to be created, the rest of the race propagating of itself. The first creation, on the other hand, must come forth ”out of nothing,”--_i. e._, the spirit has toward its realization nothing but itself, or rather it has not yet even itself, but must create itself; hence its first creation is itself, _the spirit_. Mystical as this sounds, we yet go through it as an every-day experience. Are you a thinking being before you think? In creating the first thought you create yourself, the thinking one; for you do not think before you think a thought, _i. e._ have a thought. Is it not your singing that first makes you a singer, your talking that makes you a talker? Now, so too it is the production of the spiritual that first makes you a spirit.

Meantime, as you distinguish _yourself_ from the thinker, singer, and talker, so you no less distinguish yourself from the spirit, and feel very clearly that you are something beside spirit. But, as in the thinking ego hearing and sight easily vanish in the enthusiasm of thought, so you also have been seized by the spirit-enthusiasm, and you now long with all your might to become wholly spirit and to be dissolved in spirit. The spirit is your _ideal_, the unattained, the otherworldly; spirit is the name of your--G.o.d, ”G.o.d is spirit.”

Against all that is not spirit you are a zealot, and therefore you play the zealot against _yourself_ who cannot get rid of a remainder of the non-spiritual. Instead of saying, ”I am _more_ than spirit,” you say with contrition, ”I am less than spirit; and spirit, pure spirit, or the spirit that is nothing but spirit, I can only think of, but am not; and, since I am not it, it is another, exists as another, whom I call 'G.o.d'.”

It lies in the nature of the case that the spirit that is to exist as pure spirit must be an otherworldly one, for, since I am not it, it follows that it can only be _outside_ me; since in any case a human being is not fully comprehended in the concept ”spirit,” it follows that the pure spirit, the spirit as such, can only be outside of men, beyond the human world,--not earthly, but heavenly.

Only from this disunion in which I and the spirit lie; only because ”I”

and ”spirit” are not names for one and the same thing, but different names for completely different things; only because I am not spirit and spirit not I,--only from this do we get a quite tautological explanation of the necessity that the spirit dwells in the other world, _i. e._ is G.o.d.

But from this it also appears how thoroughly theological is the liberation that Feuerbach[14] is laboring to give us. What he says is that we had only mistaken our own essence, and therefore looked for it in the other world, but that now, when we see that G.o.d was only our human essence, we must recognize it again as ours and move it back out of the other world into this. To G.o.d, who is spirit, Feuerbach gives the name ”Our Essence.” Can we put up with this, that ”Our Essence” is brought into opposition to _us_,--that we are split into an essential and an unessential self? Do we not therewith go back into the dreary misery of seeing ourselves banished out of ourselves?

What have we gained, then, when for a variation we have transferred into ourselves the divine outside us? _Are we_ that which is in us? As little as we are that which is outside us. I am as little my heart as I am my sweetheart, this ”other self” of mine. Just because we are not the spirit that dwells in us, just for that reason we had to take it and set it outside us; it was not we, did not coincide with us, and therefore we could not think of it as existing otherwise than outside us, on the other side from us, in the other world.

With the strength of _despair_ Feuerbach clutches at the total substance of Christianity, not to throw it away, no, to drag it to himself, to draw it, the long-yearned-for, ever-distant, out of its heaven with a last effort, and keep it by him forever. Is not that a clutch of the uttermost despair, a clutch for life or death, and is it not at the same time the Christian yearning and hungering for the other world? The hero wants not to go into the other world, but to draw the other world to him, and compel it to become this world! And since then has not all the world, with more or less consciousness, been crying that ”this world” is the vital point, and heaven must come down on earth and be experienced even here?

Let us, in brief, set Feuerbach's theological view and our contradiction over against each other!

”The essence of man is man's supreme being;[15] now by religion, to be sure, the _supreme being_ is called _G.o.d_ and regarded as an _objective_ essence, but in truth it is only man's own essence; and therefore the turning point of the world's history is that henceforth no longer _G.o.d_, but man, is to appear to man as G.o.d.”[16]

To this we reply: The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but, just because it is his _essence_ and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as ”G.o.d,” or find it in him and call it ”Essence of Man” or ”Man.” _I_ am neither G.o.d nor _Man_,[17] neither the supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me. Nay, we really do always think of the supreme being as in both kinds of otherworldliness, the inward and outward, at once; for the ”Spirit of G.o.d” is, according to the Christian view, also ”our spirit,” and ”dwells in us.”[18] It dwells in heaven and dwells in us; we poor things are just its ”dwelling,” and, if Feuerbach goes on to destroy its heavenly dwelling and force it to move to us bag and baggage, then we, its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded.

But after this digression (which, if we were at all proposing to work by line and level, we should have had to save for later pages in order to avoid repet.i.tion) we return to the spirit's first creation, the spirit itself.

The spirit is something other than myself. But this other, what is it?

-- 2.--THE POSSESSED.

Have you ever seen a spirit? ”No, not I, but my grandmother.” Now, you see, it's just so with me too; I myself haven't seen any, but my grandmother had them running between her feet all sorts of ways, and out of confidence in our grandmothers' honesty we believe in the existence of spirits.