Note 295 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

This is obviously the answer to Baur, who, after paying tribute to the personality of Feuerbach, and presenting a tolerably fair summary of his critical philosophy, can find no answer to it save the inept protest that it is one-sided in respect of its reduction of religion to the subjective (the very course insisted on by a hundred defenders!), that it favours the communistic and other extreme tendencies of the time, and that it brings everything “under the rude rule of egoism.”295 Here a philosophic and an aspersive meaning are furtively combined in one word. The scientific subjectivism of Feuerbach’s analysis of religion is no more a vindication or acceptance of “rude egoism” than is the Christian formula of “God’s will” a condonation of murder. The restraint of egoism by altruism lies in human character and polity alike for the rationalist and for the irrationalist, as Baur must have known well enough after his long survey of Church history. His really contemptible escape from Feuerbach’s criticism, under cover of alternate cries of “Communism” and “egoism”—a self-stultification which needs no comment—is simply one more illustration of the fashion in which, since the time of Kant, philosophy in Germany as elsewhere has been chronically demoralized by resort to non-philosophical tests. “Max Stirner” (pen-name of Johann Caspar Schmidt, 1806–1856) carried the philosophic “egoism” of Feuerbach about as far in words as might be; but his work on the Ego (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, 1845) remains an ethical curiosity rather than a force.296