Note 289 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

3. From the collisions of philosophic systems in Germany there emerged two great practical freethinking forces, the teachings of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–76), who was obliged to give up his lecturing at Erlangen in 1830 after the issue of his Thoughts upon Death and Immortality, and Ludwig Büchner, who was deprived of his chair of clinic at Tübingen in 1855 for his Force and Matter. The former, originally a Hegelian, expressly broke away from his master, declaring that, whereas Hegel belonged to the “Old Testament” of modern philosophy, he himself would set forth the New, wherein Hegel’s fundamentally incoherent treatment of deity (as the total process of things on the one hand, and an objective personality on the other) should be cured.289 Feuerbach accordingly, in his Essence of Christianity (1841) and Essence of Religion (1851), supplied one of the first adequate modern statements of the positively rationalistic position as against Christianity and theism, in terms of philosophic as well as historical insight—a statement to which there is no characteristically modern answer save in terms of the refined sentimentalism of the youthful Renan,290 fundamentally averse alike to scientific precision and to intellectual consistency.