But the would-be buyers mostly lack the means to make themselves buyers: they have no money. For money, then, the purchasable things are indeed to be had ("For money everything is to be had!"), but it is exactly money that is lacking. Where is one to get money, this current or circulating property? Know then, you have as much money(76) as you have -- might; for you count(77) for as much as you make yourself count for.

One pays not with money, of which there may come a lack, but with his competence, by which alone we are "competent";(78) for one is proprietor only so far as the arm of our power reaches.

Weitling has thought out a new means of payment -- work. But the true means of payment remains, as always, *competence*. With what you have "within your competence" you pay. Therefore think on the enlargement of your competence.

This being admitted, they are nevertheless right on hand again with the motto, "To each according to his competence!" Who is to *give* to me according to my competence? Society? Then I should have to put up with its estimation. Rather, I shall *take* according to my competence.

"All belongs to all!" This proposition springs from the same unsubstantial theory. To each belongs only what he is competent for. If I say, The world belongs to me, properly that too is empty talk, which has a meaning only in so far as I respect no alien property. But to me belongs only as much as I am competent for, or have within my competence.

One is not worthy to have what one, through weakness, lets be taken from him; one is not worthy of it because one is not capable of it.

They raise a mighty uproar over the "wrong of a thousand years" which is being committed by the rich against the poor. As if the rich were to blame for poverty, and the poor were not in like manner responsible for riches! Is there another difference between the two than that of competence and incompetence, of the competent and incompetent? Wherein, pray, does the crime of the rich consist? "In their hardheartedness." But who then have maintained the poor? Who have cared for their nourishment? Who have given alms, those alms that have even their name from mercy (*eleemosyne*)? Have not the rich been "merciful" at all times? Are they not to this day "tender-hearted," as poor-taxes, hospitals, foundations of all sorts, etc., prove?

But all this does not satisfy you! Doubtless, then, they are to *share* with the poor? Now you are demanding that they shall abolish poverty. Aside from the point that there might be hardly one among you who would act so, and that this one would be a fool for it, do ask yourselves: why should the rich let go their fleeces and give up *themselves*, thereby pursuing the advantage of the poor rather than their own? You, who have your thaler daily, are rich above thousands who live on four groschen. Is it for your interest to share with the thousands, or is it not rather for theirs? --

With competition is connected less the intention to do the thing *best* than the intention to make it as *profitable*, as productive, as possible. Hence people study to get into the civil service (pot-boiling study), study cringing and flattery, routine and "acquaintance with business," work "for appearance." Hence, while it is apparently a matter of doing "good service," in truth only a "good business" and earning of money are looked out for. The job is done only ostensibly for the job's sake, but in fact on account of the gain that it yields. One would indeed prefer not to be censor, but one wants to be -- advanced; one would like to judge, administer, etc., according to his best convictions, but one is afraid of transference or even dismissal; one must, above all things -- live.

Thus these goings-on are a fight for *dear life*, and, in gradation upward, for more or less of a "good living."

And yet, withal, their whole round of toil and care brings in for most only "bitter life" and "bitter poverty." All the bitter painstaking for this!

Restless acquisition does not let us take breath, take a calm *enjoyment:* we do not get the comfort of our possessions.

But the organization of labor touches only such labors as others can do for us, slaughtering, tillage, etc.; the rest remain egoistic, because no one can in your stead elaborate your musical compositions, carry out your projects of painting, etc.; nobody can replace Raphael's labors. The latter are labors of a unique person,(79) which only he is competent to achieve, while the former deserved to be called "human," since what is anybody's *own* in them is of slight account, and almost "any man" can be trained to it.

Now, as society can regard only labors for the common benefit, *human* labors, he who does anything *unique* remains without its care; nay, he may find himself disturbed by its intervention. The unique person will work himself forth out of society all right, but society brings forth no unique person.

Hence it is at any rate helpful that we come to an agreement about *human* labors, that they may not, as under competition, claim all our time and toil. So far Communism will bear its fruits. For before the dominion of the commonalty even that for which all men are qualified, or can be qualified, was tied up to a few and withheld from the rest: it was a privilege. To the commonalty it looked equitable to leave free all that seemed to exist for every "man." But, because left(80) free, it was yet given to no one, but rather left to each to be got hold of by his *human* power. By this the mind was turned to the acquisition of the human, which henceforth beckoned to every one; and there arose a movement which one hears so loudly bemoaned under the name of "materialism."

Communism seeks to check its course, spreading the belief that the human is not worth so much discomfort, and, with sensible arrangements, could be gained without the great expense of time and powers which has hitherto seemed requisite.

But for whom is time to be gained? For what does man require more time than is necessary to refresh his wearied powers of labor? Here Communism is silent.

For what? To take comfort in himself as the unique, after he has done his part as man!

In the first joy over being allowed to stretch out their hands toward everything human, people forgot to want anything else; and they competed away vigorously, as if the possession of the human were the goal of all our wishes.

But they have run themselves tired, and are gradually noticing that "possession does not give happiness." Therefore they are thinking of obtaining the necessary by an easier bargain, and spending on it only so much time and toil as its indispensableness exacts. Riches fall in price, and contented poverty, the care-free ragamuffin, becomes the seductive ideal.

Should such human activities, that every one is confident of his capacity for, be highly salaried, and sought for with toil and expenditure of all life-forces? Even in the everyday form of speech, "If I were minister, or even the., then it should go quite otherwise," that confidence expresses itself -- that one holds himself capable of playing the part of such a dignitary; one does get a perception that to things of this sort there belongs not uniqueness, but only a culture which is attainable, even if not exactly by all, at any rate by many; *i.e.* that for such a thing one need only be an ordinary man.

If we assume that, as *order* belongs to the essence of the State, so *subordination* too is founded in its nature, then we see that the subordinates, or those who have received preferment, disproportionately *overcharge* and *overreach* those who are put in the lower ranks. But the latter take heart (first from the Socialist standpoint, but certainly with egoistic consciousness later, of which we will therefore at once give their speech some coloring) for the question, By what then is your property secure, you creatures of preferment? -- and give themselves the answer, By our refraining from interference! And so by *our* protection! And what do you give us for it? Kicks and disdain you give to the "common people"; police supervision, and a catechism with the chief sentence "Respect what is *not yours*, what belongs to *others!* respect others, and especially your superiors!" But we reply, "If you want our respect, *buy* it for a price agreeable to us. We will leave you your property, if you give a due equivalent for this leaving." Really, what equivalent does the general in time of peace give for the many thousands of his yearly income.? -- another for the sheer hundred-thousands and millions yearly? What equivalent do you give for our chewing potatoes and looking calmly on while you swallow oysters? Only buy the oysters of us as dear as we have to buy the potatoes of you, then you may go on eating them. Or do you suppose the oysters do not belong to us as much as to you? You will make an outcry over *violence* if we reach out our hands and help consume them, and you are right. Without violence we do not get them, as you no less have them by doing violence to us.

But take the oysters and have done with it, and let us consider our nearer property, labor; for the other is only possession. We distress ourselves twelve hours in the sweat of our face, and you offer us a few groschen for it. Then take the like for your labor too. Are you not willing? You fancy that our labor is richly repaid with that wage, while yours on the other hands is worth a wage of many thousands. But, if you did not rate yours so high, and gave us a better chance to realize value from ours, then we might well, if the case demanded it, bring to pass still more important things than you do for the many thousand thalers; and, if you got only such wages as we, you would soon grow more industrious in order to receive more. But, if you render any service that seems to us worth ten and a hundred times more than our own labor, why, then you shall get a hundred times more for it too; we, on the other hand, think also to produce for you things for which you will requite us more highly than with the ordinary day's wages. We shall be willing to get along with each other all right, if only we have first agreed on this -- that neither any longer needs to -- *present* anything to the other. Then we may perhaps actually go so far as to pay even the cripples and sick and old an appropriate price for not parting from us by hunger and want; for, if we want them to live, it is fitting also that we -- purchase the fulfillment of our will. I say "purchase," and therefore do not mean a wretched "alms." For their life is the property even of those who cannot work; if we (no matter for what reason) want them not to withdraw this life from us, we can mean to bring this to pass only by purchase; nay, we shall perhaps (maybe because we like to have friendly faces about us) even want a life of comfort for them. In short, we want nothing presented by you, but neither will we present you with anything. For centuries we have handed alms to you from goodhearted -- stupidity, have doled out the mite of the poor and given to the masters the things that are -- not the masters'; now just open your wallet, for henceforth our ware rises in price quite enormously. We do not want to take from you anything, anything at all, only you are to pay better for what you want to have. What then have you? "I have an estate of a thousand acres." And I am your plowman, and will henceforth attend to your fields only for one thaler a day wages. "Then I'll take another." You won't find any, for we plowmen are no longer doing otherwise, and, if one puts in an appearance who takes less, then let him beware of us. There is the housemaid, she too is now demanding as much, and you will no longer find one below this price. "Why, then it is all over with me." Not so fast! You will doubtless take in as much as we; and, if it should not be so, we will take off so much that you shall have wherewith to live like us. "But I am accustomed to live better." We have nothing against that, but it is not our look-out; if you can clear more, go ahead. Are we to hire out under rates, that you may have a good living?

The rich man always puts off the poor with the words, "What does your want concern me? See to it how you make your way through the world; that is *your affair*, not mine." Well, let us let it be our affair, then, and let us not let the means that we have to realize value from ourselves be pilfered from us by the rich. "But you uncultured people really do not need so much." Well, we are taking somewhat more in order that for it we may procure the culture that we perhaps need. "But, if you thus bring down the rich, who is then to support the arts and sciences hereafter?" Oh, well, we must make it up by numbers; we club together, that gives a nice little sum -- besides, you rich men now buy only the most tasteless books and the most lamentable Madonnas or a pair of lively dancer's legs. "O ill-starred equality!" No, my good old sir, nothing of equality. We only want to count for what we are worth, and, if you are worth more, you shall count for more right along. We only want to be *worth our price*, and think to show ourselves worth the price that you will pay.

Is the State likely to be able to awaken so secure a temper and so forceful a self-consciousness in the menial? Can it make man feel himself? Nay, may it even do so much as set this goal for itself? Can it want the individual to recognize his value and realize this value from himself? Let us keep the parts of the double question separate, and see first whether the State can bring about such a thing. As the unanimity of the plowmen is required, only this unanimity can bring it to pass, and a State law would be evaded in a thousand ways by competition and in secret.

But can the State bear with it? The State cannot possibly bear with people's suffering coercion from another than it; it could not, therefore, admit the self-help of the unanimous plowmen against those who want to engage for lower wages. Suppose, however, that the State made the law, and all the plowmen were in accord with it: could the State bear with it then?

In the isolated case -- yes; but the isolated case is more than that, it is a case of *principle*. The question therein is of the whole range of the *ego's self-realization of value from himself*, and therefore also of his self-consciousness *against* the State. So far the Communists keep company; but, as self-realization of value from self necessarily directs itself against the State, so it does against *society* too, and therewith reaches out beyond the commune and the communistic -- out of egoism.

Communism makes the maxim of the commonalty, that every one is a possessor ("proprietor"), into an irrefragable truth, into a reality, since the anxiety about *obtaining* now ceases and every one *has* from the start what he requires. In his labor-force he *has* his competence, and, if he makes no use of it, that is his fault. The grasping and hounding is at an end, and no competition is left (as so often now) without fruit, because with every stroke of labor an adequate supply of the needful is brought into the house. Now for the first time one is a *real possessor*, because what one has in his labor-force can no longer escape from him as it was continually threatening to do under the system of competition. One is a *care-free* and assured possessor. And one is this precisely by seeking his competence no longer in a ware, but in his own labor, his competence for labor; and therefore by being a *ragamuffin*, a man of only ideal wealth. *I*, however, cannot content myself with the little that I scrape up by my competence for labor, because my competence does not consist merely in my labor.

By labor I can perform the official functions of a president, a minister, etc.; these offices demand only a general culture -- to wit, such a culture as is generally attainable (for general culture is not merely that which every one has attained, but broadly that which every one can attain, and therefore every special culture, *e. g.* medical, military, philological, of which no "cultivated man" believes that they surpass his powers), or, broadly, only a skill possible to all.

But, even if these offices may vest in every one, yet it is only the individual's unique force, peculiar to him alone. that gives them, so to speak, life and significance. That he does not manage his office like an "ordinary man." but puts in the competence of his uniqueness, this he is not yet paid for when he is paid only in general as an official or a minister. If he has done it so as to earn your thanks, and you wish to retain this thank-worthy force of the unique one, you must not pay him like a mere man who performed only what was human, but as one who accomplishes what is unique. Do the like with your labor, do!

There cannot be a general schedule-price fixed for my uniqueness as there can for what I do as man. Only for the latter can a schedule-price be set.

Go right on, then, setting up a general appraisal for human labors, but do not deprive your uniqueness of its desert.

*Human* or *general* needs can be satisfied through society; for satisfaction of *unique* needs you must do some seeking. A friend and a friendly service, or even an individual's service, society cannot procure you. And yet you will every moment be in need of such a service, and on the slightest occasions require somebody who is helpful to you. Therefore do not rely on society, but see to it that you have the wherewithal to -- purchase the fulfillment of your wishes.

Whether money is to be retained among egoists? To the old stamp an inherited possession adheres. If you no longer let yourselves be paid with it, it is ruined: if you do nothing for this money, it loses all power. Cancel the *inheritance*, and you have broken off the executor's court-seal. For now everything is an inheritance, whether it be already inherited or await its heir. If it is yours, wherefore do you let it be sealed up from you? Why do you respect the seal?

But why should you not create a new money? Do you then annihilate the ware in taking from it the hereditary stamp? Now, money is a ware, and an essential *means* or competence. For it protects against the ossification of resources, keeps them in flux and brings to pass their exchange. If you know a better medium of exchange, go ahead; yet it will be a "money" again. It is not the money that does you damage, but your incompetence to take it. Let your competence take effect, collect yourselves, and there will be no lack of money -- of your money, the money of *your* stamp. But working I do not call "letting your competence take effect." Those who are only "looking for work" and "willing to work hard" are preparing for their own selves the infallible upshot -- to be out of work.

Good and bad luck depend on money. It is a power in the *bourgeois* period for this reason, that it is only wooed on all hands like a girl, indissolubly wedded by nobody. All the romance and chivalry of *wooing* for a dear object come to life again in competition. Money, an object of longing, is carried off by the bold "knights of industry."(81)

He who has luck takes home the bride. The ragamuffin has luck; he takes her into his household, "society," and destroys the virgin. In his house she is no longer bride, but wife; and with her virginity her family name is also lost. As housewife the maiden Money is called "Labor," for "Labor" is her husband's name. She is a possession of her husband's.

To bring this figure to an end, the child of Labor and Money is again a girl, an unwedded one and therefore Money but with the certain descent from Labor, her father. The form of the face, the "effigy," bears another stamp.

Finally, as regards competition once more, it has a continued existence by this very means, that all do not attend to *their affair* and come to an *understanding* with each other about it. Bread *e. g.* is a need of all the inhabitants of a city; therefore they might easily agree on setting up a public bakery. Instead of this, they leave the furnishing of the needful to the competing bakers. Just so meat to the butchers, wine to wine-dealers, etc.

Abolishing competition is not equivalent to favoring the guild. The difference is this: In the *guild* baking, etc., is the affair of the guild-brothers; in *competition*, the affair of chance competitors; in the *union*, of those who require baked goods, and therefore my affair, yours, the affair of neither the guildic nor the concessionary baker, but the affair of the *united*.

If *I* do not trouble myself about my affair, I must be *content* with what it pleases others to vouchsafe me. To have bread is my affair, my wish and desire, and yet people leave that to the bakers and hope at most to obtain through their wrangling, their getting ahead of each other, their rivalry --in short, their competition -- an advantage which one could not count on in the case of the guild-brothers who were lodged *entirely* and *alone* in the proprietorship of the baking franchise. -- What every one requires, every one should also take a hand in procuring and producing; it is *his* affair, his property, not the property of the guildic or concessionary master.

Let us look back once more. The world belongs to the children of this world, the children of men; it is no longer God's world, but man's. As much as every man can procure of it, let him call his; only the true man, the State, human society or mankind, will look to it that each shall make nothing else his own than what he appropriates as man, *i.e.* in human fashion. Unhuman appropriation is that which is not consented to by man, *i.e.*, it is a "criminal" appropriation, as the human, *vice versa*, is a "rightful" one, one acquired in the "way of law."

So they talk since the Revolution.

But my property is not a thing, since this has an existence independent of me; only my might is my own. Not this tree, but my might or control over it, is what is mine.

Now, how is this might perversely expressed? They say I have a *right* to this tree, or it is my *rightful* property. So I have *earned* it by might. That the might must last in order that the tree may also be *held --* or better, that the might is not a thing existing of itself, but has existence solely in the *mighty ego*, in me the mighty -- is forgotten. Might, like other of my *qualities* (*e. g.* humanity, majesty, etc.), is exalted to something existing of itself, so that it still exists long after it has ceased to be *my* might. Thus transformed into a ghost, might is -- *right*. This *eternalized* might is not extinguished even with my death, but is transferred to "bequeathed."

Things now really belong not to me, but to right.

On the other side, this is nothing but a hallucination of vision. For the individual's might becomes permanent and a right only by others joining their might with his. The delusion consists in their believing that they cannot withdraw their might. The same phenomenon over again; might is separated from me. I cannot take back the might that I gave to the possessor. One has "granted power of attorney," has given away his power, has renounced coming to a better mind.

The proprietor can give up his might and his right to a thing by giving the thing away, squandering it, etc. And *we* should not be able likewise to let go the might that we lend to him?

The rightful man, the *just*, desires to call nothing his own that he does not have "rightly" or have the right to, and therefore only *legitimate property*.

Now, who is to be judge, and adjudge his right to him? At last, surely, Man, who imparts to him the rights of man: then he can say, in an infinitely broader sense than Terence, *humani nihil a me alienum puto*, *e. g.*, *the human is my property*. However he may go about it, so long as he occupies this standpoint he cannot get clear of a judge; and in our time the multifarious judges that had been selected have set themselves against each other in two persons at deadly enmity -- to wit, in God and Man. The one party appeal to divine right, the other to human right or the rights of man.

So much is clear, that in neither case does the individual do the entitling himself.

Just pick me out an action today that would not be a violation of right! Every moment the rights of man are trampled under foot by one side, while their opponents cannot open their mouth without uttering a blasphemy against divine right. Give an alms, you mock at a right of man, because the relation of beggar and benefactor is an inhuman relation; utter a doubt, you sin against a divine right. Eat dry bread with contentment, you violate the right of man by your equanimity; eat it with discontent, you revile divine right by your repining. There is not one among you who does not commit a crime at every moment; your speeches are crimes, and every hindrance to your freedom of speech is no less a crime. Ye are criminals altogether!

Yet you are so only in that you all stand on the *ground of right*, *i.e.* in that you do not even know, and understand how to value, the fact that you are criminals.

Inviolable or *sacred* property has grown on this very ground: it is a *juridical concept*.

A dog sees the bone in another's power, -- and stands off only if it feels itself too weak. But man respects the other's *right* to his bone. The latter action, therefore, ranks as *human*, the former as *brutal* or "egoistic."

And as here, so in general, it is called *"human"* when one sees in everything something *spiritual* (here right), *i.e.* makes everything a ghost and takes his attitude toward it as toward a ghost, which one can indeed scare away at its appearance, but cannot kill. It is human to look at what is individual not as individual, but as a generality.

In nature as such I no longer respect anything, but know myself to be entitled to everything against it; in the tree in that garden, on the other hand, I must respect *alienness* (they say in one-sided fashion "property"), I must keep my hand off it. This comes to an end only when I can indeed leave that tree to another as I leave my stick. etc., to another, but do not in advance regard it as alien to me, *i.e.* sacred. Rather, I make to myself no *crime* of felling it if I will, and it remains my property, however long as I resign it to others: it is and remains *mine*. In the banker's fortune I as little see anything alien as Napoleon did in the territories of kings: we have no *dread* of *"conquering"* it, and we look about us also for the means thereto. We strip off from it, therefore, the *spirit* of *alienness*, of which we had been afraid.

Therefore it is necessary that I do not lay claim to, anything more *as man*, but to everything as I, this I; and accordingly to nothing human, but to mine; *i. e.*, nothing that pertains to me as man, but -- what I will and because I will it.

Rightful, or legitimate, property of another will be only that which *you* are content to recognize as such. If your content ceases, then this property has lost legitimacy for you, and you will laugh at absolute right to it.

Besides the hitherto discussed property in the limited sense, there is held up to our reverent heart another property against which we are far less "to sin." This property consists in spiritual goods, in the "sanctuary of the inner nature." What a man holds sacred, no other is to gibe at; because, untrue as it may be, and zealously as one may "in loving and modest wise" seek to convince of a true sanctity the man who adheres to it and believes in it, yet *the sacred* itself is always to be honored in it: the mistaken man does believe in the sacred, even though in an incorrect essence of it, and so his belief in the sacred must at least be respected.

In ruder times than ours it was customary to demand a particular faith, and devotion to a particular sacred essence, and they did not take the gentlest way with those who believed otherwise; since, however, "freedom of belief" spread itself more and more abroad, the "jealous God and sole Lord" gradually melted into a pretty general "supreme being," and it satisfied humane tolerance if only every one revered "something sacred."

Reduced to the most human expression, this sacred essence is "man himself" and "the human." With the deceptive semblance as if the human were altogether our own, and free from all the otherworldliness with which the divine is tainted -- yes, as if Man were as much as I or you -- there may arise even the proud fancy that the talk is no longer of a "sacred essence" and that we now feel ourselves everywhere at home and no longer in the uncanny,(82) *i.e.* in the sacred and in sacred awe: in the ecstasy over "Man discovered at last" the egoistic cry of pain passes unheard, and the spook that has become so intimate is taken for our true ego.

But "Humanus is the saint's name" (see Goethe), and the humane is only the most clarified sanctity.

The egoist makes the reverse declaration. For this precise reason, because you hold something sacred, I gibe at you; and, even if I respected everything in you, your sanctuary is precisely what I should not respect.

With these opposed views there must also be assumed a contradictory relation to spiritual goods: the egoist insults them, the religious man (*i.e.* every one who puts his "essence" above himself) must consistently -- protect them. But what kind of spiritual goods are to be protected, and what left unprotected, depends entirely on the concept that one forms of the "supreme being"; and he who fears God, *e. g.*, has more to shelter than he (the liberal) who fears Man.

In spiritual goods we are (in distinction from the sensuous) injured in a spiritual way, and the sin against them consists in a direct *desecration*, while against the sensuous a purloining or alienation takes place; the goods themselves are robbed of value and of consecration, not merely taken away; the sacred is immediately compromised. With the word "irreverence" or "flippancy" is designated everything that can be committed as *crime* against spiritual goods, *i.e.* against everything that is sacred for us; and scoffing, reviling, contempt, doubt, etc., are only different shades of *criminal flippancy*.

That desecration can be practiced in the most manifold way is here to be passed over, and only that desecration is to be preferentially mentioned which threatens the sacred with danger through an *unrestricted press*.

As long as respect is demanded even for one spiritual essence, speech and the press must be enthralled in the name of this essence; for just so long the egoist might "trespass" against it by his *utterances*, from which thing he must be hindered by "due punishment" at least, if one does not prefer to take up the more correct means against it, the preventive use of police authority, *e. g.* censorship.

What a sighing for liberty of the press! What then is the press to be liberated from? Surely from a dependence, a belonging, and a liability to service!

But to liberate himself from that is every one's affair, and it may with safety be assumed that, when you have delivered yourself from liability to service, that which you compose and write will also belong to you as your *own* instead of having been thought and indicted *in* the service of some power. What can a believer in Christ say and have printed, that should be freer from that belief in Christ than he himself is? If I cannot or may not write something, perhaps the primary fault lies with *me*. Little as this seems to hit the point, so near is the application nevertheless to be found. By a press-law I draw a boundary for my publications, or let one be drawn, beyond which wrong and its *punishment* follows. I myself *limit* myself.

If the press was to be free, nothing would be so important as precisely its liberation from every coercion that could be put on it in the *name of a law*. And, that it might come to that, I my own self should have to have absolved myself from obedience to the law.

Certainly, the absolute liberty of the press is like every absolute liberty, a nonentity. The press can become free from full many a thing, but always only from what I too am free from. If we make ourselves free from the sacred, if we have become *graceless* and *lawless*, our words too will become so.

As little as *we* can be declared clear of every coercion in the world, so little can our writing be withdrawn from it. But as free as we are, so free we can make it too.

It must therefore become our *own*, instead of, as hitherto, serving a spook.

People do not yet know what they mean by their cry for liberty of the press. What they ostensibly ask is that the State shall set the press free; but what they are really after, without knowing it themselves, is that the press become free from the State, or clear of the State. The former is a *petition to* the State, the latter an *insurrection against* the State. As a "petition for right," even as a serious demanding of the right of liberty of the press, it presupposes the State as the giver, and can hope only for a *present*, a permission, a chartering. Possible, no doubt, that a State acts so senselessly as to grant the demanded present; but you may bet everything that those who receive the present will not know how to use it so long as they regard the State as a truth: they will not trespass against this "sacred thing," and will call for a penal press-law against every one who would be willing to dare this.

In a word, the press does not become free from what I am not free from.

Do I perhaps hereby show myself an opponent of the liberty of the press? On the contrary, I only assert that one will never get it if one wants only it, the liberty of the press, *i.e.* if one sets out only for an unrestricted permission. Only beg right along for this permission: you may wait forever for it, for there is no one in the world who could give it to you. As long as you want to have yourselves "entitled" to the use of the press by a permission, *i.e.* liberty of the press, you live in vain hope and complaint.

"Nonsense! Why, you yourself, who harbor such thoughts as stand in your book, can unfortunately bring them to publicity only through a lucky chance or by stealth; nevertheless you will inveigh against one's pressing and importuning his own State till it gives the refused permission to print?" But an author thus addressed would perhaps -- for the impudence of such people goes far -- give the following reply: "Consider well what you say! What then do I do to procure myself liberty of the press for my book? Do I ask for permission, or do I not rather, without any question of legality, seek a favorable occasion and grasp it in complete recklessness of the State and its wishes? I -- the terrifying word must be uttered -- I cheat the State. You unconsciously do the same. From your tribunes you talk it into the idea that it must give up its sanctity and inviolability, it must lay itself bare to the attacks of writers, without needing on that account to fear danger. But you are imposing on it; for its existence is done for as soon as it loses its unapproachableness. To *you* indeed it might well accord liberty of writing, as England has done; you are *believers in the State* and incapable of writing against the State, however much you would like to reform it and 'remedy its defects.' But what if opponents of the State availed themselves of free utterance, and stormed out against Church, State, morals, and everything 'sacred' with inexorable reasons? You would then be the first, in terrible agonies, to call into life the *September laws*. Too late would you then rue the stupidity that earlier made you so ready to fool and palaver into compliance the State, or the government of the State. -- But, I prove by my act only two things. This for one, that the liberty of the press is always bound to 'favorable opportunities,' and accordingly will never be an absolute liberty; but secondly this, that he who would enjoy it must seek out and, if possible, create the favorable opportunity, availing himself of his *own advantage* against the State; and counting himself and his will more than the State and every 'superior' power. Not in the State, but only against it, can the liberty of the press be carried through; if it is to be established, it is to be obtained not as the consequence of a *petition* but as the work of an *insurrection*. Every petition and every motion for liberty of the press is already an insurrection, be it conscious or unconscious: a thing which Philistine halfness alone will not and cannot confess to itself until, with a shrinking shudder, it shall see it clearly and irrefutably by the outcome. For the requested liberty of the press has indeed a friendly and well-meaning face at the beginning, as it is not in the least minded ever to let the 'insolence of the press' come into vogue; but little by little its heart grows more hardened, and the inference flatters its way in that really a liberty is not a liberty if it stands in the *service* of the State, of morals, or of the law. A liberty indeed from the coercion of censorship, it is yet not a liberty from the coercion of law. The press, once seized by the lust for liberty, always wants to grow freer, till at last the writer says to himself, really I am not wholly free till I ask about nothing; and writing is free only when it is my *own*, dictated to me by no power or authority, by no faith, no dread; the press must not be free -- that is too little -- it must be *mine: -- ownness of the press* or *property in the press*, that is what I will take.

"Why, liberty of the press is only *permission of the press*, and the State never will or can voluntarily permit me to grind it to nothingness by the press."

Let us now, in conclusion, bettering the above language, which is still vague, owing to the phrase 'liberty of the press,' rather put it thus: *"liberty of the press*, the liberals' loud demand, is assuredly possible in the State; yes, it is possible only *in* the State, because it is a *permission*, and consequently the permitter (the State) must not be lacking. But as permission it has its limit in this very State, which surely should not in reason permit more than is compatible with itself and its welfare: the State fixes for it this limit as the *law* of its existence and of its extension. That one State brooks more than another is only a quantitative distinction, which alone, nevertheless, lies at the heart of the political liberals: they want in Germany, *i. e.*, only a '*more extended, broader* accordance of free utterance.' The liberty of the press which is sought for is an affair of the *people's*, and before the people (the State) possesses it I may make no use of it. From the standpoint of property in the press, the situation is different. Let my people, if they will, go without liberty of free press, I will manage to print by force or ruse; I get my permission to print only from -- *myself* and my strength.

If the press is *my own*, I as little need a permission of the State for employing it as I seek that permission in order to blow my nose. The press is my *property* from the moment when nothing is more to me than myself; for from this moment State, Church, people, society, etc., cease, because they have to thank for their existence only the disrespect that I have for myself, and with the vanishing of this undervaluation they themselves are extinguished: they exist only when they exist *above me*, exist only as *powers* and *power-holders*. Or can you imagine a State whose citizens one and all think nothing of it? It would be as certainly a dream, an existence in seeming, as 'united Germany.'

The press is my own as soon as I myself am my own, a self- owned man: to the egoist belongs the world, because he belongs to no power of the world.

With this my press might still be very *unfree*, as *e. g.* at this moment. But the world is large, and one helps himself as well as he can. If I were willing to abate from the *property* of my press, I could easily attain the point where I might everywhere have as much printed as my fingers produced. But, as I want to assert my property, I must necessarily swindle my enemies. 'Would you not accept their permission if it were given you?' Certainly, with joy; for their permission would be to me a proof that I had fooled them and started them on the road to ruin. I am not concerned for their permission, but so much the more for their folly and their overthrow. I do not sue for their permission as if I flattered myself (like the political liberals) that we both, they and I, could make out peaceably alongside and with each other, yes, probably raise and prop each other; but I sue for it in order to make them bleed to death by it, that the permitters themselves may cease at last. I act as a conscious enemy, overreaching them and *utilizing* their heedlessness.

The press is *mine* when I recognize outside myself no *judge* whatever over its utilization, *i.e.* when my writing is no longer determined by morality or religion or respect for the State laws or the like, but by me and my egoism!"

Now, what have you to reply to him who gives you so impudent an answer? -- We shall perhaps put the question most strikingly by phrasing it as follows: Whose is the press, the people's (State's) or mine? The politicals on their side intend nothing further than to liberate the press from personal and arbitrary interferences of the possessors of power, without thinking of the point that to be really open for everybody it would also have to be free from the laws, from the people's (State's) will. They want to make a "people's affair" of it.

But, having become the people's property, it is still far from being mine; rather, it retains for me the subordinate significance of a *permission*. The people plays judge over my thoughts; it has the right of calling me to account for them, or, I am responsible to it for them. Jurors, when their fixed ideas are attacked, have just as hard heads as the stiffest despots and their servile officials.

In the *"Liberale Bestrebungen*"(83) Edgar Bauer asserts that liberty of the press is impossible in the absolutist and the constitutional State, whereas in the "free State" it finds its place. "Here," the statement is, "it is recognized that the individual, because he is no longer an individual but a member of a true and rational generality, has the right to utter his mind." So not the individual, but the "member," has liberty of the press. But, if for the purpose of liberty of the press the individual must first give proof of himself regarding his belief in the generality, the people; if he does not have this liberty *through might of his own --* then it is a *people's liberty*, a liberty that he is invested with for the sake of his faith, his "membership." The reverse is the case: it is precisely as an individual that every one has open to him the liberty to utter his mind. But he has not the "right": that liberty is assuredly not his "sacred right." He has only the *might;* but the might alone makes him owner. I need no concession for the liberty of the press, do not need the people's consent to it, do not need the "right" to it, nor any "justification." The liberty of the press too, like every liberty, I must "take"; the people, "as being the sole judge," cannot *give* it to me. It can put up with me the liberty that I take, or defend itself against it; give, bestow, grant it cannot. I exercise it *despite* the people, purely as an individual; *i.e.* I get it by fighting the people, my -- enemy, and obtain it only when I really get it by such fighting, *i. e. take* it. But I take it because it is my property.

Sander, against whom E. Bauer writes, lays claim (page 99) to the liberty of the press "as the right and the liberty of the *citizens in the State"*. What else does Edgar Bauer do? To him also it is only a right of the free *citizen*.

The liberty of the press is also demanded under the name of a "general human right." Against this the objection was well-founded that not every man knew how to use it rightly, for not every individual was truly man. Never did a government refuse it to *Man* as such; but *Man* writes nothing, for the reason that he is a ghost. It always refused it to *individuals* only, and gave it to others, *e. g.* its organs. If then one would have it for all, one must assert outright that it is due to the individual, me, not to man or to the individual so far as he is man. Besides, another than a man (a beast) can make no use of it. The French government, *e. g.*, does not dispute the liberty of the press as a right of man, but demands from the individual a security for his really being man; for it assigns liberty of the press not to the individual, but to man.

Under the exact pretense that it was *not human*, what was mine was taken from me! What was human was left to me undiminished.

Liberty of the press can bring about only a *responsible* press; the *irresponsible* proceeds solely from property in the press.

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For intercourse with men an express law (conformity to which one may venture at times sinfully to forget, but the absolute value of which one at no time ventures to deny) is placed foremost among all who live religiously: this is the law -- of *love*, to which not even those who seem to fight against its principle, and who hate its name, have as yet become untrue; for they also still have love, yes, they love with a deeper and more sublimated love, they love "man and mankind."

If we formulate the sense of this law, it will be about as follows: Every man must have a something that is more to him than himself. You are to put your "private interest" in the background when it is a question of the welfare of others, the weal of the fatherland, of society, the common weal, the weal of mankind, the good cause, etc.! Fatherland, society, mankind, must be more to you than yourself, and as against their interest your "private interest" must stand back; for you must not be an --egoist.

Love is a far-reaching religious demand, which is not, as might be supposed, limited to love to God and man, but stands foremost in every regard. Whatever we do, think, will, the ground of it is always to be love. Thus we may indeed judge, but only "with love." The Bible may assuredly be criticized, and that very thoroughly, but the critic must before all things *love* it and see in it the sacred book. Is this anything else than to say he must not criticize it to death, he must leave it standing, and that as a sacred thing that cannot be upset? -- In our criticism on men too, love must remain the unchanged key-note. Certainly judgments that hatred inspires are not at all our *own* judgments, but judgments of the hatred that rules us, "rancorous judgments." But are judgments that love inspires in us any more our *own*? They are judgments of the love that rules us, they are "loving, lenient" judgments, they are not our *own*, and accordingly not real judgments at all. He who burns with love for justice cries out, *fiat justitia, pereat mundus!* He can doubtless ask and investigate what justice properly is or demands, and *in what* it consists, but not *whether* it is anything.

It is very true, "He who abides in love abides in God, and God in him." (1 John 4. 16.) God abides in him, he does not get rid of God, does not become godless; and he abides in God, does not come to himself and into his own home, abides in love to God and does not become loveless.

"God is love! All times and all races recognize in this word the central point of Christianity." God, who is love, is an officious God: he cannot leave the world in peace, but wants to make it *blest*. "God became man to make men divine."(84) He has his hand in the game everywhere, and nothing happens without it; everywhere he has his "best purposes," his "incomprehensible plans and decrees." Reason, which he himself is, is to be forwarded and realized in the whole world. His fatherly care deprives us of all independence. We can do nothing sensible without its being said, God did that, and can bring upon ourselves no misfortune without hearing, God ordained that; we have nothing that we have not from him, he "gave" everything. But, as God does, so does Man. God wants perforce to make the world *blest*, and Man wants to make it *happy*, to make all men happy. Hence every "man" wants to awaken in all men the reason which he supposes his own self to have: everything is to be rational throughout. God torments himself with the devil, and the philosopher does it with unreason and the accidental. God lets no being go *its own* gait, and Man likewise wants to make us walk only in human wise.

But whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the spook, the "true man," and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual, the real man, under the phlegmatic legal title of measures against the "un- man." He finds it praiseworthy and indispensable to exercise pitilessness in the harshest measure; for love to the spook or generality commands him to hate him who is not ghostly, *i.e.* the egoist or individual; such is the meaning of the renowned love-phenomenon that is called "justice."

The criminally arraigned man can expect no forbearance, and no one spreads a friendly veil over his unhappy nakedness. Without emotion the stern judge tears the last rags of excuse from the body of the poor accused; without compassion the jailer drags him into his damp abode; without placability, when the time of punishment has expired, he thrusts the branded man again among men, his good, Christian, loyal brethren, who contemptuously spit on him. Yes, without grace a criminal "deserving of death" is led to the scaffold, and before the eyes of a jubilating crowd the appeased moral law celebrates its sublime -- revenge. For only one can live, the moral law or the criminal. Where criminals live unpunished, the moral law has fallen; and, where this prevails, those must go down. Their enmity is indestructible.

The Christian age is precisely that of *mercy, love*, solicitude to have men receive what is due them, yes, to bring them to fulfil their human (divine) calling. Therefore the principle has been put foremost for intercourse, that this and that is man's essence and consequently his calling, to which either God has called him or (according to the concepts of today) his being man (the species) calls him. Hence the zeal for conversion. That the Communists and the humane expect from man more than the Christians do does not change the standpoint in the least. Man shall get what is human! If it was enough for the pious that what was divine became his part, the humane demand that he be not curtailed of what is human. Both set themselves against what is egoistic. Of course; for what is egoistic cannot be accorded to him or vested in him (a fief); he must procure it for himself. Love imparts the former, the latter can be given to me by myself alone.

Intercourse hitherto has rested on love, *regardful* behavior, doing for each other. As one owed it to himself to make himself blessed, or owed himself the bliss of taking up into himself the supreme essence and bringing it to a *vérité* (a truth and reality), so one owed it to *others* to help them realize their essence and their calling: in both cases one owed it to the essence of man to contribute to its realization.

But one owes it neither to himself to make anything out of himself, nor to others to make anything out of them; for one owes nothing to his essence and that of others. Intercourse resting on essence is an intercourse with the spook, not with anything real. If I hold intercourse with the supreme essence, I am not holding intercourse with myself, and, if I hold intercourse with the essence of man, I am not holding intercourse with men.

The natural man's love becomes through culture a *commandment*. But as commandment it belongs to *Man* as such. not to me; it is my *essence*,(85) about which much ado(86) is made. not my property. *Man*, *i.e.* humanity, presents that demand to me; love *is demanded*, it is my *duty*. Instead, therefore, of being really won for *me*, it has been won for the generality, *Man*, as his property or peculiarity: "it becomes man, every man, to love; love is the duty and calling of man," etc.

Consequently I must again vindicate love for *myself*, and deliver it out of the power of Man with the great M.

What was originally *mine*, but *accidentally* mine, instinctively mine, I was invested with as the property of Man; I became feoffee in loving, I became the retainer of mankind, only a specimen of this species, and acted, loving, not as *I*, but as *man*, as a specimen of man, the humanly. The whole condition of civilization is the *feudal system*, the property being Man's or mankind's, not *mine*. A monstrous feudal State was founded, the individual robbed of everything, everything left to "man." The individual had to appear at last as a "sinner through and through."

Am I perchance to have no lively interest in the person of another, are *his* joy and *his* weal not to lie at my heart, is the enjoyment that I furnish him not to be more to me than other enjoyments of my own? On the contrary, I can with joy sacrifice to him numberless enjoyments, I can deny myself numberless things for the enhancement of *his* pleasure, and I can hazard for him what without him was the dearest to me, my life, my welfare, my freedom. Why, it constitutes my pleasure and my happiness to refresh myself with his happiness and his pleasure. But *myself, my own self*, I do not sacrifice to him, but remain an egoist and -- enjoy him. If I sacrifice to him everything that but for my love to him I should keep, that is very simple, and even more usual in life than it seems to be; but it proves nothing further than that this one passion is more powerful in me than all the rest. Christianity too teaches us to sacrifice all other passions to this. But, if to one passion I sacrifice others, I do not on that account go so far as to sacrifice *myself*, nor sacrifice anything of that whereby I truly am myself; I do not sacrifice my peculiar value, my *ownness*. Where this bad case occurs, love cuts no better figure than any other passion that I obey blindly. The ambitious man, who is carried away by ambition and remains deaf to every warning that a calm moment begets in him, has let this passion grow up into a despot against whom he abandons all power of dissolution: he has given up himself, because he cannot *dissolve* himself, and consequently cannot absolve himself from the passion: he is possessed.

I love men too -- not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes *me* happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no "commandment of love." I have a *fellow-feeling* with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them. *Per contra*, the high-souled, virtuous Philistine prince Rudolph in *The Mysteries of Paris*, because the wicked provoke his "indignation," plans their torture. That fellow-feeling proves only that the feeling of those who feel is mine too, my property; in opposition to which the pitiless dealing of the "righteous" man (*e. g.* against notary Ferrand) is like the unfeelingness of that robber [Procrustes] who cut *off* or stretched his prisoners' legs to the measure of his bedstead: Rudolph's bedstead, which he cuts men to fit, is the concept of the "good." The for right, virtue, etc., makes people hard-hearted and intolerant. Rudolph does not feel like the notary, but the reverse; he feels that "it serves the rascal right"; that is no fellow-feeling.

You love man, therefore you torture the individual man, the egoist; your philanthropy (love of men) is the tormenting of men.

If I see the loved one suffer, I suffer with him, and I know no rest till I have tried everything to comfort and cheer him; if I see him glad, I too become glad over his joy. From this it does not follow that suffering or joy is caused in me by the same thing that brings out this effect in him, as is sufficiently proved by every bodily pain which I do not feel as he does; his tooth pains him, but his pain pains me.

But, because I cannot bear the troubled crease on the beloved forehead, for that reason, and therefore for my sake, I kiss it away. If I did not love this person, he might go right on making creases, they would not trouble me; I am only driving away *my* trouble.

How now, has anybody or anything, whom and which I do not love, a *right* to be loved by me? Is my love first, or is his right first? Parents, kinsfolk, fatherland, nation, native town, etc., finally fellowmen in general ("brothers, fraternity"), assert that they have a right to my love, and lay claim to it without further ceremony. They look upon it as *their property*, and upon me, if I do not respect this, as a robber who takes from them what pertains to them and is theirs. I *should* love. If love is a commandment and law, then I must be educated into it, cultivated up to it, and, if I trespass against it, punished. Hence people will exercise as strong a "moral influence" as possible on me to bring me to love. And there is no doubt that one can work up and seduce men to love as one can to other passions -- if you like, to hate. Hate runs through whole races merely because the ancestors of the one belonged to the Guelphs, those of the other to the Ghibellines.

But love is not a commandment, but, like each of my feelings, *my property. Acquire*, *i.e.* purchase, my property, and then I will make it over to you. A church, a nation, a fatherland, a family, etc., that does not know how to acquire my love, I need not love; and I fix the purchase price of my love quite at my pleasure.

Selfish love is far distant from unselfish, mystical, or romantic love. One can love everything possible, not merely men, but an "object" in general (wine, one's fatherland, etc.). Love becomes blind and crazy by a *must* taking it out of my power (infatuation), romantic by a *should* entering into it, *i.e.* by the "objects" becoming sacred for me, or my becoming bound to it by duty, conscience, oath. Now the object no longer exists for me, but I for it.

Love is a possessedness, not as my feeling -- as such I rather keep it in my possession as property -- but through the alienness of the object. For religious love consists in the commandment to love in the beloved a "holy one," or to adhere to a holy one; for unselfish love there are objects *absolutely lovable* for which my heart is to beat, *e. g.* fellow-men, or my wedded mate, kinsfolk, etc. Holy Love loves the holy in the beloved, and therefore exerts itself also to make of the beloved more and more a holy one (a "man").

The beloved is an object that *should* be loved by me. He is not an object of my love on account of, because of, or by, my loving him, but is an object of love in and of himself. Not I make him an object of love, but he is such to begin with; for it is here irrelevant that he has become so by my choice, if so it be (as with a *fiancée*, a spouse, etc.), since even so he has in any case, as the person once chosen, obtained a "right of his own to my love," and I, because I have loved him, am under obligation to love him forever. He is therefore not an object of *my* love, but of love in general: an object that *should* be loved. Love appertains to him, is due to him, or is his *right*, while I am under *obligation* to love him. My love, *i.e.* the toll of love that I pay him, is in truth *his* love, which he only collects from me as toll.

Every love to which there clings but the smallest speck of obligation is an unselfish love, and, so far as this speck reaches, a possessedness. He who believes that he *owes* the object of his love anything loves romantically or religiously.

Family love, *e. g.* as it is usually understood as "piety," is a religious love; love of fatherland, preached as "patriotism," likewise. All our romantic loves move in the same pattern: everywhere the hypocrisy, or rather self-deception, of an "unselfish love," an interest in the object for the object's sake, not for my sake and mine alone.

Religious or romantic love is distinguished from sensual love by the difference of the object indeed, but not by the dependence of the relation to it. In the latter regard both are possessedness; but in the former the one object is profane, the other sacred. The dominion of the object over me is the same in both cases, only that it is one time a sensuous one, the other time a spiritual (ghostly) one. My love is my own only when it consists altogether in a selfish and egoistic interest, and when consequently the object of my love is really *my* object or my property. I owe my property nothing, and have no duty to it, as little as I might have a duty to my eye; if nevertheless I guard it with the greatest care, I do so on my account.

Antiquity lacked love as little as do Christian times; the god of love is older than the God of Love. But the mystical possessedness belongs to the moderns.

The possessedness of love lies in the alienation of the object, or in my powerlessness as against its alienness and superior power. To the egoist nothing is high enough for him to humble himself before it, nothing so independent that he would live for love of it, nothing so sacred that he would sacrifice himself to it. The egoist's love rises in selfishness, flows in the bed of selfishness, and empties into selfishness again.

Whether this can still be called love? If you know another word for it, go ahead and choose it; then the sweet word love may wither with the departed world; for the present I at least find none in our *Christian* language, and hence stick to the old sound and "love" *my* object, my -- property.

Only as one of my feelings do I harbor love; but as a power above me, as a divine power, as Feuerbach says, as a passion that I am not to cast off, as a religious and moral duty, I -- scorn it. As my feeling it is *mine;* as a principle to which I consecrate and "vow" my soul it is a dominator and *divine*, just as hatred as a principle *is diabolical;* one not better than the other. In short, egoistic love, *i.e.* my love, is neither holy nor unholy, neither divine nor diabolical.

"A love that is limited by faith is an untrue love. The sole limitation that does not contradict the essence of love is the self-limitation of love by reason, intelligence. Love that scorns the rigor, the law, of intelligence, is theoretically a false love, practically a ruinous one."(87) So love is in its essence *rational!* So thinks Feuerbach; the believer, on the contrary, thinks, Love is in its essence *believing*. The one inveighs against *irrational*, the other against *unbelieving*, love. To both it can at most rank as a *splendidum vitium*. Do not both leave love standing, even in the form of unreason and unbelief? They do not dare to say, irrational or unbelieving love is nonsense, is not love; as little as they are willing to say, irrational or unbelieving tears are not tears. But, if even irrational love, etc., must count as love, and if they are nevertheless to be unworthy of man, there follows simply this: love is not the highest thing, but reason or faith; even the unreasonable and the unbelieving can love; but love has value only when it is that of a rational or believing person. It is an illusion when Feuerbach calls the rationality of love its "self-limitation"; the believer might with the same right call belief its "self-limitation." Irrational love is neither "false" nor "ruinous"; its does its service as love.

Toward the world, especially toward men, I am to *assume a particular feeling*, and "meet them with love," with the feeling of love, from the beginning. Certainly, in this there is revealed far more free-will and self-determination than when I let myself be stormed, by way of the world, by all possible feelings, and remain exposed to the most checkered, most accidental impressions. I go to the world rather with a preconceived feeling, as if it were a prejudice and a preconceived opinion; I have prescribed to myself in advance my behavior toward it, and, despite all its temptations, feel and think about it only as I have once determined to. Against the dominion of the world I secure myself by the principle of love; for, whatever may come, I -- love. The ugly -- *e. g.* --makes a repulsive impression on me; but, determined to love, I master this impression as I do every antipathy.

But the feeling to which I have determined and -- condemned myself from the start is a *narrow* feeling, because it is a predestined one, of which I myself am not able to get clear or to declare myself clear. Because preconceived, it is a *prejudice. I* no longer show myself in face of the world, but my love shows itself. The *world* indeed does not rule me, but so much the more inevitably does the spirit of *love* rule this spirit.

If I first said, I love the world, I now add likewise: I do not love it, for I *annihilate* it as I annihilate myself; I *dissolve it*. I do not limit myself to one feeling for men, but give free play to all that I am capable of. Why should I not dare speak it out in all its glaringness? Yes, I *utilize* the world and men! With this I can keep myself open to every impression without being torn away from myself by one of them. I can love, love with a full heart, and let the most consuming glow of passion burn in my heart, without taking the beloved one for anything else than the *nourishment* of my passion, on which it ever refreshes itself anew. All my care for him applies only to the *object of my love*, only to him whom my love *requires*, only to him, the "warmly loved." How indifferent would he be to me without this -- my love! I feed only my love with him, I *utilize* him for this only: I *enjoy* him.

Let us choose another convenient example. I see how men are fretted in dark superstition by a swarm of ghosts. If to the extent of my powers I let a bit of daylight fall in on the nocturnal spookery, is it perchance because love to you inspires this in me? Do I write out of love to men? No, I write because I want to procure for *my* thoughts an existence in the world; and, even if I foresaw that these thoughts would deprive you of your rest and your peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the fall of many generations springing up from this seed of thought -- I would nevertheless scatter it. Do with it what you will and can, that is your affair and does not trouble me. You will perhaps have only trouble, combat, and death from it, very few will draw joy from it. If your weal lay at my heart, I should act as the church did in withholding the Bible from the laity, or Christian governments, which make it a sacred duty for themselves to "protect the common people from bad books."

But not only not for your sake, not even for truth's sake either do I speak out what I think. No --

I sing as the bird sings That on the bough alights; The song that from me springs Is pay that well requites.

I sing because -- I am a singer. But I *use*(88) you for it because I -- need(89) ears.

Where the world comes in my way -- and it comes in my way everywhere -- I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but --my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of *usableness*, of utility, of use. We owe *each other* nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to *me*, and my air serves *my* wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.

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One has to be educated up to that love which founds itself on the "essence of man" or, in the ecclesiastical and moral period, lies upon us as a "commandment." In what fashion moral influence, the chief ingredient of our education, seeks to regulate the intercourse of men shall here be looked at with egoistic eyes in one example at least.

Those who educate us make it their concern early to break us of lying and to inculcate the principle that one must always tell the truth. If selfishness were made the basis for this rule, every one would easily understand how by lying he fools away that confidence in him which he hopes to awaken in others, and how correct the maxim proves, Nobody believes a liar even when he tells the truth. Yet, at the same time, he would also feel that he had to meet with truth only him whom *he* authorized to hear the truth. If a spy walks in disguise through the hostile camp, and is asked who he is, the askers are assuredly entitled to inquire after his name, but the disguised man does not give them the right to learn the truth from him; he tells them what he likes, only not the fact. And yet morality demands, "Thou shalt not lie!" By morality those persons are vested with the right to expect the truth; but by me they are not vested with that right, and I recognize only the right that *I* impart. In a gathering of revolutionists the police force their way in and ask the orator for his name; everybody knows that the police have the right to do so, but they do not have it from the *revolutionist*, since he is their enemy; he tells them a false name and --cheats them with a lie. The police do not act so foolishly either as to count on their enemies' love of truth; on the contrary, they do not believe without further ceremony, but have the questioned individual "identified" if they can. Nay, the State -- everywhere proceeds incredulously with individuals, because in their egoism it recognizes its natural enemy; it invariably demands a "voucher," and he who cannot show vouchers falls a prey to its investigating inquisition. The State does not believe nor trust the individual, and so of itself places itself with him in the *convention of lying*; it trusts me only when it has *convinced* itself of the truth of my statement, for which there often remains to it no other means than the oath. How clearly, too, this (the oath) proves that the State does not count on our credibility and love of truth, but on our *interest*, our selfishness: it relies on our not wanting to fall foul of God by a perjury.

Now, let one imagine a French revolutionist in the year 1788, who among friends let fall the now well-known phrase, "the world will have no rest till the last king is hanged with the guts of the last priest." The king then still had all power, and, when the utterance is betrayed by an accident, yet without its being possible to produce witnesses, confession is demanded from the accused. Is he to confess or not?

If he denies, he lies and -- remains unpunished; if he confesses, he is candid and -- is beheaded. If truth is more than everything else to him, all right, let him die. Only a paltry poet could try to make a tragedy out of the end of his life; for what interest is there in seeing how a man succumbs from cowardice? But, if he had the courage not to be a slave of truth and sincerity, he would ask somewhat thus: Why need the judges know what I have spoken among friends? If I had *wished* them to know, I should have said it to them as I said it to my friends. I will not have them know it. They force themselves into my confidence without my having called them to it and made them my confidants; they *will* learn what I *will* keep secret. Come on then, you who wish to break my will by your will, and try your arts. You can torture me by the rack, you can threaten me with hell and eternal damnation, you can make me so nerveless that I swear a false oath, but the truth you shall not press out of me, for I *will* lie to you because I have given you no claim and no right to my sincerity. Let God, "who is truth," look down ever so threateningly on me, let lying come ever so hard to me, I have nevertheless the courage of a lie; and, even if I were weary of my life, even if nothing appeared to me more welcome than your executioner's sword, you nevertheless should not have the joy of finding in me a slave of truth, whom by your priestly arts you make a traitor to his *will*. When I spoke those treasonable words, I would not have had you know anything of them; I now retain the same will, and do not let myself be frightened by the curse of the lie.

Sigismund is not a miserable caitiff because he broke his princely word, but he broke the word because he was a caitiff; he might have kept his word and would still have been a caitiff, a priest-ridden man. Luther, driven by a higher power, became unfaithful to his monastic vow: he became so for God's sake. Both broke their oath as possessed persons: Sigismund, because he wanted to appear as a *sincere* professor of the divine *truth*, *i. e.*, of the true, genuinely Catholic faith; Luther, in order to give testimony for the gospel *sincerely* and with entire truth. with body and soul; both became perjured in order to be sincere toward the "higher truth." Only, the priests absolved the one, the other absolved himself. What else did both observe than what is contained in those apostolic words, "Thou hast not lied to men, but to God?" They lied to men, broke their oath before the world's eyes, in order not to lie to God, but to serve him. Thus they show us a way to deal with truth before men. For God's glory, and for God's sake, a -- breach of oath, a lie, a prince's word broken!

How would it be, now, if we changed the thing a little and wrote, A perjury and lie for -- *my sake?* Would not that be pleading for every baseness? It seems so, assuredly, only in this it is altogether like the "for God's sake." For was not every baseness committed for God's sake, were not all the scaffolds filled for his sake and all the *autos-da-fé* held for his sake, was not all stupefaction introduced for his sake? And do they not today still for God's sake fetter the mind in tender children by religious education? Were not sacred vows broken for his sake, and do not missionaries and priests still go around every day to bring Jews, heathen, Protestants or Catholics, to treason against the faith of their fathers -- for his sake? And that should be worse with the *for my sake?* What then does *on my account* mean? There people immediately think of *"filthy lucre"*. But he who acts from love of filthy lucre does it on his own account indeed, as there is nothing anyhow that one does not do for his own sake -- among other things, everything that is done for God's glory; yet he, for whom he seeks the lucre, is a slave of lucre, not raised above lucre; he is one who belongs to lucre, the money-bag, not to himself; he is not his own. Must not a man whom the passion of avarice rules follow the commands of this *master?* And, if a weak goodnaturedness once beguiles him, does this not appear as simply an exceptional case of precisely the same sort as when pious believers are sometimes forsaken by their Lord's guidance and ensnared by the arts of the "devil?" So an avaricious man is not a self-owned man, but a servant; and he can do nothing for his own sake without at the same time doing it for his lord's sake -- precisely like the godly man.

Famous is the breach of oath which Francis I committed against Emperor Charles V. Not later, when he ripely weighed his promise, but at once, when he swore the oath, King Francis took it back in thought as well as by a secret protestation documentarily subscribed before his councillors; he uttered a perjury aforethought. Francis did not show himself disinclined to buy his release, but the price that Charles put on it seemed to him too high and unreasonable. Even though Charles behaved himself in a sordid fashion when he sought to extort as much as possible, it was yet shabby of Francis to want to purchase his freedom for a lower ransom; and his later dealings, among which there occurs yet a second breach of his word, prove sufficiently how the huckster spirit held him enthralled and made him a shabby swindler. However, what shall we say to the reproach of perjury against him? In the first place, surely, this again: that not the perjury, but his sordidness, shamed him; that he did not deserve contempt for his perjury, but made himself guilty of perjury because he was a contemptible man. But Francis's perjury, regarded in itself, demands another judgment. One might say Francis did not respond to the confidence that Charles put in him in setting him free. But, if Charles had really favored him with confidence, he would have named to him the price that he considered the release worth, and would then have set him at liberty and expected Francis to pay the redemption-sum. Charles harbored no such trust, but only believed in Francis's impotence and credulity, which would not allow him to act against his oath; but Francis deceived only this -- credulous calculation. When Charles believed he was assuring himself of his enemy by an oath, right there he was freeing him from every obligation. Charles had given the king credit for a piece of stupidity, a narrow conscience, and, without confidence in Francis, counted only on Francis's stupidity, *e. g.*, conscientiousness: he let him go from the Madrid prison only to hold him the more securely in the prison of conscientiousness, the great jail built about the mind of man by religion: he sent him back to France locked fast in invisible chains, what wonder if Francis sought to escape and sawed the chains apart? No man would have taken it amiss of him if he had secretly fled from Madrid, for he was in an enemy's power; but every good Christian cries out upon him, that he wanted to loose himself from God's bonds too. (It was only later that the pope absolved him from his oath.)

It is despicable to deceive a confidence that we voluntarily call forth; but it is no shame to egoism to let every one who wants to get us into his power by an oath bleed to death by the failure of his untrustful craft. If you have wanted to bind me, then learn that I know how to burst your bonds.

The point is whether I give the confider the right to confidence. If the pursuer of my friend asks me where he has fled to, I shall surely put him on a false trail. Why does he ask precisely me, the pursued man's friend? In order not to be a false, traitorous friend, I prefer to be false to the enemy. I might certainly in courageous conscientiousness, answer, "I will not tell" (so Fichte decides the case); by that I should salve my love of truth and do for my friend as much as -- nothing, for, if I do not mislead the enemy, he may accidentally take the right street, and my love of truth would have given up my friend as a prey, because it hindered me from the --courage for a lie. He who has in the truth an idol, a sacred thing, must *humble* himself before it, must not defy its demands, not resist courageously; in short, he must renounce the *heroism of the lie*. For to the lie belongs not less courage than to the truth: a courage that young men are most apt to be defective in, who would rather confess the truth and mount the scaffold for it than confound the enemy's power by the impudence of a lie. To them the truth is "sacred," and the sacred at all times demands blind reverence, submission, and self-sacrifice. If you are not impudent, not mockers of the sacred, you are tame and its servants. Let one but lay a grain of truth in the trap for you, you peck at it to a certainty, and the fool is caught. You will not lie? Well, then, fall as sacrifices to the truth and become -- martyrs! Martyrs! -- for what? For yourselves, for self-ownership? No, for your goddess -- the truth. You know only two *services*, only two kinds of servants: servants of the truth and servants of the lie. Then in God's name serve the truth!

Others, again, serve the truth also; but they serve it "in moderation," and make, *e. g.* a great distinction between a simple lie and a lie sworn to. And yet the whole chapter of the oath coincides with that of the lie, since an oath, everybody knows, is only a strongly assured statement. You consider yourselves entitled to lie, if only you do not swear to it besides? One who is particular about it must judge and condemn a lie as sharply as a false oath. But now there has been kept up in morality an ancient point of controversy, which is customarily treated of under the name of the "lie of necessity." No one who dares plead for this can consistently put from him an "oath of necessity." If I justify my lie as a lie of necessity, I should not be so pusillanimous as to rob the justified lie of the strongest corroboration. Whatever I do, why should I not do it entirely and without reservations (*reservatio mentalis*)? If I once lie, why then not lie completely, with entire consciousness and all my might? As a spy I should have to swear to each of my false statements at the enemy's demand; determined to lie to him, should I suddenly become cowardly and undecided in face of an oath? Then I should have been ruined in advance for a liar and spy; for, you see, I should be voluntarily putting into the enemy's hands a means to catch me. -- The State too fears the oath of necessity, and for this reason does not give the accused a chance to swear. But you do not justify the State's fear; you lie, but do not swear falsely. If, *e. g.* you show some one a kindness, and he is not to know it, but he guesses it and tells you so to your face, you deny; if he insists, you say, "honestly, no!" If it came to swearing, then you would refuse; for, from fear of the sacred, you always stop half way. *Against* the sacred you have no *will of your own*. You lie in -- moderation, as you are free "in moderation," religious "in moderation" (the clergy are not to "encroach"; over this point the most rapid of controversies is now being carried on, on the part of the university against the church), monarchically disposed "in moderation" (you want a monarch limited by the constitution, by a fundamental law of the State), everything nicely *tempered*, lukewarm, half God's, half the devil's.

There was a university where the usage was that every word of honor that must be given to the university judge was looked upon by the students as null and void. For the students saw in the demanding of it nothing but a snare, which they could not escape otherwise than by taking away all its significance. He who at that same university broke his word of honor to one of the fellows was infamous; he who gave it to the university judge derided, in union with these very fellows, the dupe who fancied that a word had the same value among friends and among foes. It was less a correct theory than the constraint of practice that had there taught the students to act so, as, without that means of getting out, they would have been pitilessly driven to treachery against their comrades. But, as the means approved itself in practice, so it has its theoretical probation too. A word of honor, an oath, is one only for him whom I entitle to receive it; he who forces me to it obtains only a forced, *i.e.* a *hostile* word, the word of a foe, whom one has no right to trust; for the foe does not give us the right.

Aside from this, the courts of the State do not even recognize the inviolability of an oath. For, if I had sworn to one who comes under examination that I would not declare anything against him, the court would demand my declaration in spite of the fact that an oath binds me, and, in case of refusal, would lock me up till I decided to become -- an oath-breaker. The court "absolves me from my oath"; -- how magnanimous! If any power can absolve me from the oath, I myself am surely the very first power that has a claim to.

As a curiosity, and to remind us of customary oaths of all sorts, let place be given here to that which Emperor Paul commanded the captured Poles (Kosciuszko, Potocki, Niemcewicz, and others) to take when he released them: "We not merely swear fidelity and obedience to the emperor, but also further promise to pour out our blood for his glory; we obligate ourselves to discover everything threatening to his person or his empire that we ever learn; we declare finally that, in whatever part of the earth we may be, a single word of the emperor shall suffice to make us leave everything and repair to him at once."

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In one domain the principle of love seems to have been long outsoared by egoism, and to be still in need only of sure consciousness, as it were of victory with a good conscience. This domain is speculation, in its double manifestation as thinking and as trade. One thinks with a will, whatever may come of it; one speculates, however many may suffer under our speculative undertakings. But, when it finally becomes serious, when even the last remnant of religiousness, romance, or "humanity" is to be done away, then the pulse of religious conscience beats, and one at least *professes* humanity. The avaricious speculator throws some coppers into the poor-box and "does good," the bold thinker consoles himself with the fact that he is working for the advancement of the human race and that his devastation "turns to the good" of mankind, or, in another case, that he is "serving the idea"; mankind, the idea, is to him that something of which he must say, It is more to me than myself.

To this day thinking and trading have been done for -- God's sake. Those who for six days were trampling down everything by their selfish aims sacrificed on the seventh to the Lord; and those who destroyed a hundred "good causes" by their reckless thinking still did this in the service of another "good cause," and had yet to think of another -- besides themselves -- to whose good their self-indulgence should turn; of the people, mankind, etc. But this other thing is a being above them, a higher or supreme being; and therefore I say, they are toiling for God's sake.

Hence I can also say that the ultimate basis of their actions is -- love. Not a voluntary love however, not their own, but a tributary love, or the higher being's own (God's, who himself is love); in short, not the egoistic, but the religious; a love that springs from their fancy that they *must* discharge a tribute of love, *i.e.* that they must not be "egoists."

If *we* want to deliver the world from many kinds of unfreedom, we want this not on its account but on ours; for, as we are not world-liberators by profession and out of "love," we only want to win it away from others. We want to make it *our* own; it is not to be any longer *owned as serf* by God (the church) nor by the law (State), but to be *our own*; therefore we seek to "win" it, to "captivate" it, and, by meeting it halfway and "devoting" ourselves to it as to ourselves as soon as it belongs to us, to complete and make superfluous the force that it turns against us. If the world is ours, it no longer attempts any force *against* us, but only *with us*. My selfishness has an interest in the liberation of the world, that it may become -- my property.

Not isolation or being alone, but society, is man's original state. Our existence begins with the most intimate conjunction, as we are already living with our mother before we breathe; when we see the light of the world, we at once lie on a human being's breast again, her love cradles us in the lap, leads us in the go-cart, and chains us to her person with a thousand ties. Society is our *state of nature*. And this is why, the more we learn to feel ourselves, the connection that was formerly most intimate becomes ever looser and the dissolution of the original society more unmistakable. To have once again for herself the child that once lay under her heart, the mother must fetch it from the street and from the midst of its playmates. The child prefers the *intercourse* that it enters into with *its fellows* to the *society* that it has not entered into, but only been born in.

But the dissolution of *society* is *intercourse* or *union*. A society does assuredly arise by union too, but only as a fixed idea arises by a thought -- to wit, by the vanishing of the energy of the thought (the thinking itself, this restless taking back all thoughts that make themselves fast) from the thought. If a union(90) has crystallized into a society, it has ceased to be a coalition;(91) for coalition is an incessant self-uniting; it has become a unitedness, come to a standstill, degenerated into a fixity; it is -- *dead* as a union, it is the corpse of the union or the coalition, *i.e.* it is --society, community. A striking example of this kind is furnished by the *party*.

That a society (*e. g.* the society of the State) diminishes my *liberty* offends me little. Why, I have to let my liberty be limited by all sorts of powers and by every one who is stronger; nay, by every fellow-man; and, were I the autocrat of all the R......, I yet should not enjoy absolute liberty. But *ownness* I will not have taken from me. And ownness is precisely what every society has designs on, precisely what is to succumb to its power.

A society which I join does indeed take from me many liberties, but in return it affords me other liberties; neither does it matter if I myself deprive myself of this and that liberty (*e. g.* by any contract). On the other hand, I want to hold jealously to my ownness. Every community has the propensity, stronger or weaker according to the fullness of its power, to become an *authority* to its members and to set *limits* for them: it asks, and must ask, for a "subject's limited understanding"; it asks that those who belong to it be subjected to it, be its "subjects"; it exists only by *subjection*. In this a certain tolerance need by no means be excluded; on the contrary, the society will welcome improvements, corrections, and blame, so far as such are calculated for its gain: but the blame must be "well-meaning," it may not be "insolent and disrespectful" -- in other words, one must leave uninjured, and hold sacred, the substance of the society. The society demands that those who belong to it shall not *go beyond it* and exalt themselves, but remain "within the bounds of legality," *e. g.*, allow themselves only so much as the society and its law allow them.

There is a difference whether my liberty or my ownness is limited by a society. If the former only is the case, it is a coalition, an agreement, a union; but, if ruin is threatened to ownness, it is *a power of itself*, a power *above me*, a thing unattainable by me, which I can indeed admire, adore, reverence, respect, but cannot subdue and consume, and that for the reason that I *am resigned*. It exists by my *resignation*, my *self-renunciation*, my spiritlessness,(92) called --

HUMILITY.(93) My humility makes its courage,(94) my submissiveness gives it its dominion.

But in reference to *liberty*, State and union are subject to no essential difference. The latter can just as little come into existence, or continue in existence, without liberty's being limited in all sorts of ways, as the State is compatible with unmeasured liberty. Limitation of liberty is inevitable everywhere, for one cannot get *rid* of everything; one cannot fly like a bird merely because one would like to fly so, for one does not get free from his own weight; one cannot live under water as long as he likes, like a fish, because one cannot do without air and cannot get free from this indispensable necessity; etc. As religion, and most decidedly Christianity, tormented man with the demand to realize the unnatural and self- contradictory, so it is to be looked upon only as the true logical outcome of that religious over-straining and overwroughtness that finally *liberty itself, absolute liberty*, was exalted into an ideal, and thus the nonsense of the impossible to come glaringly to the light. -- The union will assuredly offer a greater measure of liberty, as well as (and especially because by it one escapes all the coercion peculiar to State and society life) admit of being considered as "a new liberty"; but nevertheless it will still contain enough of unfreedom and involuntariness. For its object is not this -- liberty (which on the contrary it sacrifices to ownness), but only *ownness*. Referred to this, the difference between State and union is great enough. The former is an enemy and murderer of *ownness*, the latter a son and co-worker of it; the former a spirit that would be adored in spirit and in truth, the latter my work, my product ; the State is the lord of my spirit, who demands faith and prescribes to me articles of faith, the creed of legality; it exerts moral influence, dominates my spirit, drives away my ego to put itself in its place as "my true ego" -- in short, the State is sacred, and as against me, the individual man, it is the true man, the spirit, the ghost; but the union is my own creation, my creature, not sacred, not a spiritual power above my spirit, as little as any association of whatever sort. As I am not willing to be a slave of my maxims, but lay them bare to my continual criticism without *any warrant*, and admit no bail at all for their persistence, so still less do I obligate myself to the union for my future and pledge my soul to it, as is said to be done with the devil, and is really the case with the State and all spiritual authority; but I am and remain *more* to myself than State, Church, God, etc.; consequently infinitely more than the union too.

That society which Communism wants to found seems to stand nearest to *coalition*. For it is to aim at the "welfare of all," oh, yes, of all, cries Weitling innumerable times, of all! That does really look as if in it no one needed to take a back seat. But what then will this welfare be? Have all one and the same welfare, are all equally well off with one and the same thing? If that be so, the question is of the "true welfare." Do we not with this come right to the point where religion begins its dominion of violence? Christianity says, Look not on earthly toys, but seek your true welfare, become -- pious Christians; being Christians is the true welfare. It is the true welfare of "all," because it is the welfare of Man as such (this spook). Now, the welfare of all is surely to be *your* and *my* welfare too? But, if you and I do not look upon that welfare as *our* welfare, will care then be taken for that in which *we* feel well? On the contrary, society has decreed a welfare as the "true welfare," if this welfare were called *e. g.* "enjoyment honestly worked for"; but if you preferred enjoyable laziness, enjoyment without work, then society, which cares for the "welfare of all," would wisely avoid caring for that in which you are well off. Communism, in proclaiming the welfare of all, annuls outright the well-being of those who hitherto lived on their income from investments and apparently felt better in that than in the prospect of Weitling's strict hours of labor. Hence the latter asserts that with the welfare of thousands the welfare of millions cannot exist, and the former must give up *their* special welfare "for the sake of the general welfare." No, let people not be summoned to sacrifice their special welfare for the general, for this Christian admonition will not carry you through; they will better understand the opposite admonition, not to let their *own* welfare be snatched from them by anybody, but to put it on a permanent foundation. Then they are of themselves led to the point that they care best for their welfare if they *unite* with others for this purpose, *e. g.*, "sacrifice a part of their liberty," yet not to the welfare of others, but to their own. An appeal to men's self-sacrificing disposition end self- renouncing love ought at least to have lost its seductive plausibility when, after an activity of thousands of years, it has left nothing behind but the -- *misère* of today. Why then still fruitlessly expect self-sacrifice to bring us better time? Why not rather hope for them from *usurpation?* Salvation comes no longer from the giver, the bestower, the loving one, but from the *taker*, the appropriator (usurper), the owner. Communism, and, consciously, egoism-reviling humanism, still count on *love*.

If community is once a need of man, and he finds himself furthered by it in his aims, then very soon, because it has become his principle, it prescribes to him its laws too, the laws of -- society. The principle of men exalts itself into a sovereign power over them, becomes their supreme essence, their God, and, as such -- law-giver. Communism gives this principle the strictest effect, and Christianity is the religion of society, for, as Feuerbach rightly says, although he does not mean it rightly, love is the essence of man; *e. g.*, the essence of society or of societary (Communistic) man. All religion is a cult of society, this principle by which societary (cultivated) man is dominated; neither is any god an ego's exclusive god, but always a society's or community's, be it of the society, "family" (Lar, Penates) or of a "people" ("national god") or of "all men" ("he is a Father of all men").

Consequently one has a prospect of extirpating religion down to the ground only when one antiquates *society* and everything that flows from this principle. But it is precisely in Communism that this principle seeks to culminate, as in it everything is to become *common* for the establishment of -- "equality." If this "equality" is won, "liberty" too is not lacking. But whose liberty? *Society's*! Society is then all in all, and men are only "for each other." It would be the glory of the -- love-State.

But I would rather be referred to men's selfishness than to their "kindnesses,"(95) their mercy, pity, etc. The former demands *reciprocity* (as thou to me, so I to thee), does nothing "gratis," and may be won and -- *bought*. But with what shall I obtain the kindness? It is a matter of chance whether I am at the time having to do with a "loving" person. The affectionate one's service can be had only by -- *begging*, be it by my lamentable appearance, by my need of help, my misery, my -- *suffering*. What can I offer him for his assistance? Nothing! I must accept it as a --present. Love is *unpayable*, or rather, love can assuredly be paid for, but only by counter-love ("One good turn deserves another"). What paltriness and beggarliness does it not take to accept gifts year in and year out without service in return, as they are regularly collected *e. g.* from the poor day-laborer? What can the receiver do for him and his donated pennies, in which his wealth consists? The day- laborer would really have more enjoyment if the receiver with his laws, his institutions, etc., all of which the day-laborer has to pay for though, did not exist at all. And yet, with it all, the poor wight *loves* his master.

No, community, as the "goal" of history hitherto, is impossible. Let us rather renounce every hypocrisy of community, and recognize that, if we are equal as men, we are not equal for the very reason that we are not men. We are equal *only in thoughts*, only when "we" are *thought*, not as we really and bodily are. I am ego, and you are ego: but I am not this thought-of ego; this ego in which we are all equal is only my *thought*. I am man, and you are man: but "man" is only a thought, a generality; neither I nor you are speakable, we are *unutterable*, because only *thoughts* are speakable and consist in speaking.

Let us therefore not aspire to community, but to *one-sidedness*. Let us not seek the most comprehensive commune, "human society," but let us seek in others only means and organs which we may use as our property! As we do not see our equals in the tree, the beast, so the presupposition that others are *our equals* springs from a hypocrisy. No one is *my equal*, but I regard him, equally with all other beings, as my property. In opposition to this I am told that I should be a man among "fellow-men" (*Judenfrage*, p. 60); I should "respect" the fellow-man in them. For me no one is a person to be respected, not even the fellow-man, but solely, like other beings, an *object* in which I take an interest or else do not, an interesting or uninteresting object, a usable or unusable person.

And, if I can use him, I doubtless come to an understanding and make myself at one with him, in order, by the agreement, to strengthen *my power*, and by combined force to accomplish more than individual force could effect. In this combination I see nothing whatever but a multiplication of my force, and I retain it only so long as it is my multiplied force. But thus it is a -- union.

Neither a natural ligature nor a spiritual one holds the union together, and it is not a natural, not a spiritual league. It is not brought about by one *blood*, not by one *faith* (spirit). In a natural league -- like a family, a tribe, a nation, yes, mankind -- the individuals have only the value of *specimens* of the same species or genus; in a spiritual league -- like a commune, a church -- the individual signifies only a *member* of the same spirit; what you are in both cases as a unique person must be -- suppressed. Only in the union can you assert yourself as unique, because the union does not possess you, but you possess it or make it of use to you.

Property is recognized in the union, and only in the union, because one no longer holds what is his as a fief from any being. The Communists are only consistently carrying further what had already been long present during religious evolution, and especially in the State; to wit, propertylessness, the feudal system.

The State exerts itself to tame the desirous man; in other words, it seeks to direct his desire to it alone, and to *content* that desire with what it offers. To sate the desire for the desirous man's sake does not come into the mind: on the contrary, it stigmatizes as an "egoistic man" the man who breathes out unbridled desire, and the "egoistic man" is its enemy. He is this for it because the capacity to agree with him is wanting to the State; the egoist is precisely what it cannot "comprehend." Since the State (as nothing else is possible) has to do only for itself, it does not take care for my needs, but takes care only of how it make away with me, *i.e.* make out of me another ego, a good citizen. It takes measures for the "improvement of morals." -- And with what does it win individuals for itself? With itself, *i.e.* with what is the State's, with *State property*. It will be unremittingly active in making all participants in its "goods," providing all with the "good things of culture"; it presents them its education, opens to them the access to its institutions of culture, capacitates them to come to property (*i.e.* to a fief) in the way of industry, etc. For all these *fiefs* it demands only the just rent of continual *thanks*. But the "unthankful" forget to pay these thanks. -- Now, neither can "society" do essentially otherwise than the State.

You bring into a union your whole power, your competence, and *make yourself count*; in a society you are *employed*, with your working power; in the former you live egoistically, in the latter humanly, *i.e.* religiously, as a "member in the body of this Lord"; to a society you owe what you have, and are in duty bound to it, are -- possessed by "social duties"; a union you utilize, and give it up undutifully and unfaithfully when you see no way to use it further. If a society is more than you, then it is more to you than yourself; a union is only your instrument, or the sword with which you sharpen and increase your natural force; the union exists for you and through you, the society conversely lays claim to you for itself and exists even without you, in short, the society is *sacred*, the union your *own*; consumes *you, you* consume the union.

Nevertheless people will not be backward with the objection that the agreement which has been concluded may again become burdensome to us and limit our freedom; they will say, we too would at last come to this, that "every one must sacrifice a part of his freedom for the sake of the generality." But the sacrifice would not be made for the "generality's" sake a bit, as little as I concluded the agreement for the "generality's" or even for any other man's sake; rather I came into it only for the sake of my own benefit, from *selfishness*.(96) But, as regards the sacrificing, surely I "sacrifice" only that which does not stand in my power, *i.e.*, I "sacrifice" nothing at all.

To come back to property, the lord is proprietor. Choose then whether you want to be lord, or whether society shall be! On this depends whether you are to be an *owner* or a *ragamuffin*! The egoist is owner, the Socialist a ragamuffin. But ragamuffinism or propertylessness is the sense of feudalism, of the feudal system which since the last century has only changed its overlord, putting "Man" in the place of God, and accepting as a fief from Man what had before been a fief from the grace of God. That the ragamuffinism of Communism is carried out by the humane principle into the absolute or most ragamuffinly ragamuffinism has been shown above; but at the same time also, how ragamuffinism can only thus swing around into ownness. The *old* feudal system was so thoroughly trampled into the ground in the Revolution that since then all reactionary craft has remained fruitless, and will always remain fruitless, because the dead is -- dead; but the resurrection too had to prove itself a truth in Christian history, and has so proved itself: for in another world feudalism is risen again with a glorified body, the *new* feudalism under the suzerainty of "Man."

Christianity is not annihilated, but the faithful are right in having hitherto trustfully assumed of every combat against it that this could serve only for the purgation and confirmation of Christianity; for it has really only been glorified, and "Christianity exposed" is the -- *human Christianity*. We are still living entirely in the Christian age, and the very ones who feel worst about it are the most zealously contributing to "complete" it. The more human, the dearer has feudalism become to us; for we the less believe that it still is feudalism, we take it the more confidently for ownness and think we have found what is "most absolutely our own" when we discover "the human."

Liberalism wants to give me what is mine, but it thinks to procure it for me not under the title of mine, but under that of the "human." As if it were attainable under this mask! The rights of man, the precious work of the Revolution, have the meaning that the Man in me *entitles*(97) me to this and that; I as individual, *i.e.* as this man, am not entitled, but Man has the right and entitles me. Hence as man I may well be entitled; but, as I am more than man, to wit, a *special* man, it may be refused to this very me, the special one. If on the other hand you insist on the *value* of your gifts, keep up their price, do not let yourselves be forced to sell out below price, do not let yourselves be talked into the idea that your ware is not worth its price. do not make yourself ridiculous by a "ridiculous price," but imitate the brave man who says, I will *sell* my life (property) dear, the enemy shall not have it at a cheap *bargain*; then you have recognized the reverse of Communism as the correct thing, and the word then is not "Give up your property!" but *"Get the value out of* your property!"

Over the portal of our time stands not that "Know thyself" of Apollo, but a *"Get the value out of thyself!"*

Proudhon calls property "robbery" (*le vol*). But alien property -- and he is talking of this alone -- is not less existent by renunciation, cession, and humility; it is a *present*. Why so sentimentally call for compassion as a poor victim of robbery, when one is just a foolish, cowardly giver of presents? Why here again put the fault on others as if they were robbing us, while we ourselves do bear the fault in leaving the others unrobbed? The poor are to blame for there being rich men.

Universally, no one grows indignant at *his*, but at *alien* property. They do not in truth attack property, but the alienation of property. They want to be able to call *more*, not less, *theirs*; they want to call everything *theirs*. They are fighting, therefore, against *alienness*, or, to form a word similar to property, against alienty. And how do they help themselves therein? Instead of transforming the alien into own, they play impartial and ask only that all property be left to a third party, *e. g.* human society. They revindicate the alien not in their own name but in a third party's. Now the "egoistic" coloring is wiped off, and everything is so clean and -- human!

Propertylessness or ragamuffinism, this then is the "essence of Christianity," as it is essence of all religiousness (*i.e.* godliness, morality, humanity), and only announced itself most clearly, and, as glad tidings, became a gospel capable of development, in the "absolute religion." We have before us the most striking development in the present fight against property, a fight which is to bring "Man" to victory and make propertylessness complete: victorious humanity is the victory of --Christianity. But the "Christianity exposed" thus is feudalism completed. the most all-embracing feudal system, *i.e.* perfect ragamuffinism.

Once more then, doubtless, a "revolution" against the feudal system? --

Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the State or society, and is accordingly a *political* or *social* act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men's discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising, but a rising of individuals, a getting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution aimed at new *arrangements*; insurrection leads us no longer to *let* ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on "institutions." It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established. If I leave the established, it is dead and passes into decay. Now, as my object is not the overthrow of an established order but my elevation above it, my purpose and deed are not a political or social but (as directed toward myself and my ownness alone) an *egoistic* purpose and deed.

The revolution commands one to make *arrangements*, the insurrection(98) demands that he *rise or exalt himself*.(99) What *constitution* was to be chosen, this question busied the revolutionary heads, and the whole political period foams with constitutional fights and constitutional questions, as the social talents too were uncommonly inventive in societary arrangements (phalansteries etc.). The insurgent(100) strives to become constitutionless.

While, to get greater clearness, I am thinking up a comparison, the founding of Christianity comes unexpectedly into my mind. On the liberal side it is noted as a bad point in the first Christians that they preached obedience to the established heathen civil order, enjoined recognition of the heathen authorities, and confidently delivered a command, "Give to the emperor that which is the emperor's." Yet how much disturbance arose at the same time against the Roman supremacy, how mutinous did the Jews and even the Romans show themselves against their own temporal government! In short, how popular was "political discontent!" Those Christians would hear nothing of it; would not side with the "liberal tendencies." The time was politically so agitated that, as is said in the gospels, people thought they could not accuse the founder of Christianity more successfully than if they arraigned him for "political intrigue," and yet the same gospels report that he was precisely the one who took least part in these political doings. But why was he not a revolutionist, not a demagogue, as the Jews would gladly have seen him? Why was he not a liberal? Because he expected no salvation from a change of *conditions*, and this whole business was indifferent to him. He was not a revolutionist, like *e. g.* Caesar, but an insurgent; not a State-overturner, but one who straightened *himself* up. That was why it was for him only a matter of "Be ye wise as serpents," which expresses the same sense as, in the special case, that "Give to the emperor that which is the emperor's"; for he was not carrying on any liberal or political fight against the established authorities, but wanted to walk his *own* way, untroubled about, and undisturbed by, these authorities. Not less indifferent to him than the government were its enemies, for neither understood what he wanted, and he had only to keep them off from him with the wisdom of the serpent. But, even though not a ringleader of popular mutiny, not a demagogue or revolutionist, he (and every one of the ancient Christians) was so much the more an *insurgent*, who lifted himself above everything that seemed sublime to the government and its opponents, and absolved himself from everything that they remained bound to, and who at the same time cut off the sources of life of the whole heathen world, with which the established State must wither away as a matter of course; precisely because he put from him the upsetting of the established, he was its deadly enemy and real annihilator; for he walled it in, confidently and recklessly carrying up the building of *his* temple over it, without heeding the pains of the immured.

Now, as it happened to the heathen order of the world, will the Christian order fare likewise? A revolution certainly does not bring on the end if an insurrection is not consummated first!

My intercourse with the world, what does it aim at? I want to have the enjoyment of it, therefore it must be my property, and therefore I want to win it. I do not want the liberty of men, nor their equality; I want only *my* power over them, I want to make them my property, *i.e. material for enjoyment*. And, if I do not succeed in that, well, then I call even the power over life and death, which Church and State reserved to themselves -- mine. Brand that officer's widow who, in the flight in Russia, after her leg has been shot away, takes the garter from it, strangles her child therewith, and then bleeds to death alongside the corpse -- brand the memory of the -- infanticide. Who knows, if this child had remained alive, how much it might have "been of use to the world!" The mother murdered it because she wanted to die *satisfied* and at rest. Perhaps this case still appeals to your sentimentality, and you do not know how to read out of it anything further. Be it so; I on my part use it as an example for this, that *my* satisfaction decides about my relation to men, and that I do not renounce, from any access of humility, even the power over life and death.

As regards "social duties" in general, another does not give me my position toward others, therefore neither God nor humanity prescribes to me my relation to men, but I give myself this position. This is more strikingly said thus: I have no *duty* to others, as I have a duty even to myself (*e. g.* that of self-preservation, and therefore not suicide) only so long as I distinguish myself from myself (my immortal soul from my earthly existence, etc.).

I no longer *humble* myself before any power, and I recognize that all powers are only my power, which I have to subject at once when they threaten to become a power *against* or *above* me; each of them must be only one of *my means* to carry my point, as a hound is our power against game, but is killed by us if it should fall upon us ourselves. All powers that dominate me I then reduce to serving me. The idols exist through me; I need only refrain from creating them anew, then they exist no longer: "higher powers" exist only through my exalting them and abasing myself.

Consequently my relation to the world is this: I no longer do anything for it "for God's sake," I do nothing "for man's sake," but what I do I do "for my sake." Thus alone does the world satisfy me, while it is characteristic of the religious standpoint, in which I include the moral and humane also, that from it everything remains a pious wish (*pium desiderium*), *i.e.* an other-world matter, something unattained. Thus the general salvation of men, the moral world of a general love, eternal peace, the cessation of egoism, etc. "Nothing in this world is perfect." With this miserable phrase the good part from it, and take flight into their closet to God, or into their proud "self-consciousness." But we remain in this "imperfect" world, because even so we can use it for our -- self-enjoyment.

My intercourse with the world consists in my enjoying it, and so consuming it for my self-enjoyment. *Intercourse* is the *enjoyment of the world*, and belongs to my -- self-enjoyment.

3. My Self-Enjoyment

We stand at the boundary of a period. The world hitherto took thought for nothing but the gain of life, took care for -- *life*. For whether all activity is put on the stretch for the life of this world or of the other, for the temporal or for the eternal, whether one hankers for "daily bread" ("Give us our daily bread") or for "holy bread" ("the true bread from heaven" "the bread of God, that comes from heaven and *gives life* to the world"; "the bread of life," John 6), whether one takes care for "dear life" or for "life to eternity" -- this does not change the object of the strain and care, which in the one case as in the other shows itself to be *life*. Do the modern tendencies announce themselves otherwise? People now want nobody to be embarrassed for the most indispensable necessaries of life, but want every one to feel secure as to these; and on the other hand they teach that man has this life to attend to and the real world to adapt himself to, without vain care for another.

Let us take up the same thing from another side. When one is anxious only to live, he easily, in this solicitude, forgets the enjoyment of life. If his only concern is for life, and he thinks "if I only have my dear life," he does not apply his full strength to using, *i. e.*, enjoying, life. But how does one use life? In using it up, like the candle, which one uses in burning it up. One uses life, and consequently himself the living one, in *consuming* it and himself. *Enjoyment of life* is using life up.

Now -- we are in search of the *enjoyment* of life! And what did the religious world do? It went in search of life. Wherein consists the true life, the blessed life; etc.? How is it to be attained? What must man do and become in order to become a truly living man? How does he fulfil this calling? These and similar questions indicate that the askers were still seeking for *themselves --* to wit, themselves in the true sense, in the sense of true living. "What I am is foam and shadow; what I shall be is my true self." To chase after this self, to produce it, to realize it, constitutes the hard task of mortals, who die only to *rise again*, live only to die, live only to find the true life.

Not till I am certain of myself, and no longer seeking for myself, am I really my property; I have myself, therefore I use and enjoy myself. On the other hand, I can never take comfort in myself as long as I think that I have still to find my true self and that it must come to this, that not I but Christ or some other spiritual, *i.e.* ghostly, self (*e. g.* the true man, the essence of man, etc.) lives in me.

A vast interval separates the two views. In the old I go toward myself, in the new I start from myself; in the former I long for myself, in the latter I have myself and do with myself as one does with any other property -- I enjoy myself at my pleasure. I am no longer afraid for my life, but "squander" it.

Henceforth, the question runs, not how one can acquire life, but how one can squander, enjoy it; or, not how one is to produce the true self in himself, but how one is to dissolve himself, to live himself out.

What else should the ideal be but the sought-for ever-distant self? One seeks for himself, consequently one doth not yet have himself; one aspires toward what one *ought* to be, consequently one *is* not it. One lives in *longing* and has lived thousands of years in it, in *hope*. Living is quite another thing in -- *enjoyment!*

Does this perchance apply only to the so-called pious? No, it applies to all who belong to the departing period of history, even to its men of pleasure. For them too the work-days were followed by a Sunday, and the rush of the world by the dream of a better world, of a general happiness of humanity; in short by an ideal. But philosophers especially are contrasted with the pious. Now, have they been thinking of anything else than the ideal, been planning for anything else than the absolute self? Longing and hope everywhere, and nothing but these. For me, call it romanticism.

If the *enjoyment of life* is to triumph over the *longing for life* or hope of life, it must vanquish this in its double significance which Schiller introduces in his "Ideal and Life"; it must crush spiritual and secular poverty, exterminate the ideal and -- the want of daily bread. He who must expend his life to prolong life cannot enjoy it, and he who is still seeking for his life does not have it and can as little enjoy it: both are poor, but "blessed are the poor."

Those who are hungering for the true life have no power over their present life, but must apply it for the purpose of thereby gaining that true life, and must sacrifice it entirely to this aspiration and this task. If in the case of those devotees who hope for a life in the other world, and look upon that in this world as merely a preparation for it, the tributariness of their earthly existence, which they put solely into the service of the hoped-for heavenly existence, is pretty distinctly apparent; one would yet go far wrong if one wanted to consider the most rationalistic and enlightened as less self-sacrificing. Oh, there is to be found in the "true life" a much more comprehensive significance than the "heavenly" is competent to express. Now, is not -- to introduce the liberal concept of it at once -- the "human" and "truly human" life the true one? And is every one already leading this truly human life from the start, or must he first raise himself to it with hard toil? Does he already have it as his present life, or must he struggle for it as his future life, which will become his part only when he "is no longer tainted with any egoism"? In this view life exists only to gain life, and one lives only to make the essence of man alive in oneself, one lives for the sake of this essence. One has his life only in order to procure by means of it the "true" life cleansed of all egoism. Hence one is afraid to make any use he likes of his life: it is to serve only for the "right use."

In short, one has a *calling in life*, a task in life; one has something to realize and produce by his life, a something for which our life is only means and implement, a something that is worth more than this life, a something to which one *owes* his life. One has a God who asks a *living sacrifice*. Only the rudeness of human sacrifice has been lost with time; human sacrifice itself has remained unabated, and criminals hourly fall sacrifices to justice, and we "poor sinners" slay our own selves as sacrifices for "the human essence," the "idea of mankind," "humanity," and whatever the idols or gods are called besides.

But, because we owe our life to that something, therefore --this is the next point -- we have no right to take it from us.

The conservative tendency of Christianity does not permit thinking of death otherwise than with the purpose to take its sting from it and -- live on and preserve oneself nicely. The Christian lets everything happen and come upon him if he -- the arch-Jew -- can only haggle and smuggle himself into heaven; he must not kill himself, he must only -- preserve himself and work at the "preparation of a future abode." Conservatism or "conquest of death" lies at his heart; "the last enemy that is abolished is death."(101) "Christ has taken the power from death and brought life and *imperishable* being to light by the gospel."(102) "Imperishableness," stability.

The moral man wants the good, the right; and, if he takes to the means that lead to this goal, really lead to it, then these means are not *his* means, but those of the good, right, etc., itself. These means are never immoral, because the good end itself mediates itself through them: the end sanctifies the means. They call this maxim jesuitical, but it is "moral" through and through. The moral man acts *in the service* of an end or an idea: he makes himself the *tool* of the idea of the good, as the pious man counts it his glory to be a tool or instrument of God. To await death is what the moral commandment postulates as the good; to give it to oneself is immoral and bad: *suicide* finds no excuse before the judgment-seat of morality. If the religious man forbids it because "you have not given yourself life, but God, who alone can also take it from you again" (as if, even taking in this conception, God did not take it from me just as much when I kill myself as when a tile from the roof, or a hostile bullet, fells me; for he would have aroused the resolution of death in me too!), the moral man forbids it because I owe my life to the fatherland, etc., "because I do not know whether I may not yet accomplish good by my life." Of course, for in me good loses a tool, as God does an instrument. If I am immoral, the good is served in my *amendment*; if I am "ungodly," God has joy in my *penitence*. Suicide, therefore, is ungodly as well as nefarious. If one whose standpoint is religiousness takes his own life, he acts in forgetfulness of God; but, if the suicide's standpoint is morality, he acts in forgetfulness of duty, immorally. People worried themselves much with the question whether Emilia Galotti's death can be justified before morality (they take it as if it were suicide, which it is too in substance). That she is so infatuated with chastity, this moral good, as to yield up even her life for it is certainly moral; but, again, that she fears the weakness of her flesh is immoral.(103)

Such contradictions form the tragic conflict universally in the moral drama; and one must think and feel morally to be able to take an interest in it.

What holds good of piety and morality will necessarily apply to humanity also, because one owes his life likewise to man, mankind or the species. Only when I am under obligation to no being is the maintaining of life -- my affair. "A leap from this bridge makes me free!"

But, if we owe the maintaining of our life to that being that we are to make alive in ourselves, it is not less our duty not to lead this life according to *our* pleasure, but to shape it in conformity to that being. All my feeling, thinking, and willing, all my doing and designing, belongs to -- him.

What is in conformity to that being is to be inferred from his concept; and how differently has this concept been conceived! or how differently has that being been imagined! What demands the Supreme Being makes on the Mohammedan; what different ones the Christian, again, thinks he hears from him; how divergent, therefore, must the shaping of the lives of the two turn out! Only this do all hold fast, that the Supreme Being is to *judge*(104) our life.

But the pious who have their judge in God, and in his word a book of directions for their life, I everywhere pass by only reminiscently, because they belong to a period of development that has been lived through, and as petrifactions they may remain in their fixed place right along; in our time it is no longer the pious, but the liberals, who have the floor, and piety itself cannot keep from reddening its pale face with liberal coloring. But the liberals do not adore their judge in God, and do not unfold their life by the directions of the divine word, but regulate(105) themselves by man: they want to be not "divine" but "human," and to live so.

Man is the liberal's supreme being, man the *judge* of his life, humanity his *directions*, or catechism. God is spirit, but man is the "most perfect spirit," the final result of the long chase after the spirit or of the "searching in the depths of the Godhead," *i.e.* in the depths of the spirit.

Every one of your traits is to be human; you yourself are to be so from top to toe, in the inward as in the outward; for humanity is your calling.

Calling -- destiny -- task! --

What one can become he does become. A born poet may well be hindered by the disfavor of circumstances from standing on the high level of his time, and, after the great studies that are indispensable for this, producing *consummate* works of art; but he will make poetry, be he a plowman or so lucky as to live at the court of Weimar. A born musician will make music, no matter whether on all instruments or only on an oaten pipe. A born philosophical head can give proof of itself as university philosopher or as village philosopher. Finally, a born dolt, who, as is very well compatible with this, may at the same time be a sly-boots, will (as probably every one who has visited schools is in a position to exemplify to himself by many instances of fellow-scholars) always remain a blockhead, let him have been drilled and trained into the chief of a bureau, or let him serve that same chief as bootblack. Nay, the born shallow-pates indisputably form the most numerous class of men. And why. indeed, should not the same distinctions show themselves in the human species that are unmistakable in every species of beasts? The more gifted and the less gifted are to be found everywhere.

Only a few, however, are so imbecile that one could not get ideas into them. Hence, people usually consider all men capable of having religion. In a certain degree they may be trained to other ideas too, *e. g.* to some musical intelligence, even some philosophy. At this point then the priesthood of religion, of morality, of culture, of science, etc., takes its start, and the Communists, *e. g.* want to make everything accessible to all by their "public school." There is heard a common assertion that this "great mass" cannot get along without religion; the Communists broaden it into the proposition that not only the "great mass," but absolutely all, are called to everything.

Not enough that the great mass has been trained to religion, now it is actually to have to occupy itself with "everything human." Training is growing ever more general and more comprehensive.

You poor beings who could live so happily if you might skip according to your mind, you are to dance to the pipe of schoolmasters and bear-leaders, in order to perform tricks that you yourselves would never use yourselves for. And you do not even kick out of the traces at last against being always taken otherwise than you want to give yourselves. No, you mechanically recite to yourselves the question that is recited to you: "What am I called to? What *ought* I to do?" You need only ask thus, to have yourselves *told* what you ought to do and *ordered* to do it, to have your *calling* marked out for you, or else to order yourselves and impose it on yourselves according to the spirit's prescription. Then in reference to the will the word is, I will to do what I *ought*.

A man is "called" to nothing, and has no "calling," no "destiny," as little as a plant or a beast has a "calling." The flower does not follow the calling to complete itself, but it spends all its forces to enjoy and consume the world as well as it can -- *i.e.* it sucks in as much of the juices of the earth, as much air of the ether, as much light of the sun, as it can get and lodge. The bird lives up to no calling, but it uses its forces as much as is practicable; it catches beetles and sings to its heart's delight. But the forces of the flower and the bird are slight in comparison to those of a man, and a man who applies his forces will affect the world much more powerfully than flower and beast. A calling he has not, but he has forces that manifest themselves where they are because their being consists solely in their manifestation, and are as little able to abide inactive as life, which, if it "stood still" only a second, would no longer be life. Now, one might call out to the man, "use your force." Yet to this imperative would be given the meaning that it was man's task to use his force. It is not so. Rather, each one really uses his force without first looking upon this as his calling: at all times every one uses as much force as he possesses. One does say of a beaten man that he ought to have exerted his force more; but one forgets that, if in the moment of succumbing he had the force to exert his forces (*e. g.* bodily forces), he would not have failed to do it: even if it was only the discouragement of a minute, this was yet a --destitution of force, a minute long. Forces may assuredly be sharpened and redoubled, especially by hostile resistance or friendly assistance; but where one misses their application one may be sure of their absence too. One can strike fire out of a stone, but without the blow none comes out; in like manner a man too needs "impact."

Now, for this reason that forces always of themselves show themselves operative, the command to use them would be superfluous and senseless. To use his forces is not man's *calling* and task, but is his *act*, real and extant at all times. Force is only a simpler word for manifestation of force.

Now, as this rose is a true rose to begin with, this nightingale always a true nightingale, so I am not for the first time a true man when I fulfil my calling, live up to my destiny, but I am a "true man" from the start. My first babble is the token of the life of a "true man," the struggles of my life are the outpourings of his force, my last breath is the last exhalation of the force of the "man."

The true man does not lie in the future, an object of longing, but lies, existent and real, in the present. Whatever and whoever I may be, joyous and suffering, a child or a graybeard, in confidence or doubt, in sleep or in waking, I am it, I am the true man.

But, if I am Man, and have really found in myself him whom religious humanity designated as the distant goal, then everything "truly human" is also *my* own. What was ascribed to the idea of humanity belongs to me. That freedom of trade,

*e. g.*, which humanity has yet to attain -- and which, like an enchanting dream, people remove to humanity's golden future -- I take by anticipation as my property, and carry it on for the time in the form of smuggling. There may indeed be but few smugglers who have sufficient understanding to thus account to themselves for their doings, but the instinct of egoism replaces their consciousness. Above I have shown the same thing about freedom of the press.

Everything is my own, therefore I bring back to myself what wants to withdraw from me; but above all I always bring myself back when I have slipped away from myself to any tributariness. But this too is not my calling, but my natural act.

Enough, there is a mighty difference whether I make myself the starting-point or the goal. As the latter I do not have myself, am consequently still alien to myself, am my *essence*, my "true essence," and this "true essence," alien to me, will mock me as a spook of a thousand different names. Because I am not yet I, another (like God, the true man, the truly pious man, the rational man, the freeman, etc.) is I, my ego.

Still far from myself, I separate myself into two halves, of which one, the one unattained and to be fulfilled, is the true one. The one, the untrue, must be brought as a sacrifice; to wit, the unspiritual one. The other, the true, is to be the whole man; to wit, the spirit. Then it is said, "The spirit is man's proper essence," or, "man exists as man only spiritually." Now, there is a greedy rush to catch the spirit, as if one would then have bagged *himself*; and so, in chasing after himself, one loses sight of himself, whom he is.

And, as one stormily pursues his own self, the never-attained, so one also despises shrewd people's rule to take men as they are, and prefers to take them as they should be; and, for this reason, hounds every one on after his should-be self and "endeavors to make all into equally entitled, equally respectable, equally moral or rational men."(106)

Yes, "if men were what they *should* be, *could* be, if all men were rational, all loved each other as brothers," then it would be a paradisiacal life.(107) -- All right, men are as they should be, can be. What should they be? Surely not more than they can be! And what can they be? Not more, again, than they -- can, than they have the competence, the force, to be. But this they really are, because what they are not they are *incapable* of being; for to be capable means -- really to be. One is not capable for anything that one really is not; one is not capable of anything that one does not really do. Could a man blinded by cataracts see? Oh, yes, if he had his cataracts successfully removed. But now he cannot see because he does not see. Possibility and reality always coincide. One can do nothing that one does not, as one does nothing that one cannot.

The singularity of this assertion vanishes when one reflects that the words "it is possible that." almost never contain another meaning than "I can imagine that. . .," *e. g.*, It is possible for all men to live rationally; *e. g.*, I can imagine that all, etc. Now -- since my thinking cannot, and accordingly does not, cause all men to live rationally, but this must still be left to the men themselves -- general reason is for me only thinkable, a thinkableness, but as such in fact a *reality* that is called a possibility only in reference to what I *can* not bring to pass, to wit, the rationality of others. So far as depends on you, all men might be rational, for you have nothing against it; nay, so far as your thinking reaches, you perhaps cannot discover any hindrance either, and accordingly nothing does stand in the way of the thing in your thinking; it is thinkable to you.

As men are not all rational, though, it is probable that they -- cannot be so.

If something which one imagines to be easily possible is not, or does not happen, then one may be assured that something stands in the way of the thing, and that it is -- impossible. Our time has its art, science, etc.; the art may be bad in all conscience; but may one say that we deserved to have a better, and "could" have it if we only would? We have just as much art as we can have. Our art of today is the *only art possible*, and therefore real, at the time.

Even in the sense to which one might at last still reduce the word "possible," that it should mean "future," it retains the full force of the "real." If one says, *e. g.*, "It is possible that the sun will rise tomorrow" -- this means only, "for today tomorrow is the real future"; for I suppose there is hardly need of the suggestion that a future is real "future" only when it has not yet appeared.

Yet wherefore this dignifying of a word? If the most prolific misunderstanding of thousands of years were not in ambush behind it, if this single concept of the little word "possible" were not haunted by all the spooks of possessed men, its contemplation should trouble us little here.

The thought, it was just now shown, rules the possessed world. Well, then, possibility is nothing but thinkableness, and innumerable sacrifices have hitherto been made to hideous *thinkableness*. It was *thinkable* that men might become rational; thinkable, that they might know Christ; thinkable, that they might become moral and enthusiastic for the good; thinkable, that they might all take refuge in the Church's lap; thinkable, that they might meditate, speak, and do, nothing dangerous to the State; thinkable, that they *might* be obedient subjects; but, because it was thinkable, it was -- so ran the inference -- possible, and further, because it was possible to men (right here lies the deceptive point; because it is thinkable to me, it is possible to *men*), therefore they ought to be so, it was their *calling*; and finally -- one is to take men only according to this calling, only as *called* men, "not as they are, but as they ought to be."

And the further inference? Man is not the individual, but man is a *thought*, an *ideal*, to which the individual is related not even as the child to the man, but as a chalk point to a point thought of, or as a -- finite creature to the eternal Creator, or, according to modern views, as the specimen to the species. Here then comes to light the glorification of "humanity," the "eternal, immortal," for whose glory (*in majorem humanitatis gloriam*) the individual must devote himself and find his "immortal renown" in having done something for the "spirit of humanity."

Thus the *thinkers* rule in the world as long as the age of priests or of schoolmasters lasts, and what they think of is possible, but what is possible must be realized. They *think* an ideal of man, which for the time is real only in their thoughts; but they also think the possibility of carrying it out, and there is no chance for dispute, the carrying out is really -- thinkable, it is an -- idea.

But you and I, we may indeed be people of whom a Krummacher can *think* that we might yet become good Christians; if, however, he wanted to "labor with" us, we should soon make it palpable to him that our Christianity is only *thinkable*, but in other respects *impossible*; if he grinned on and on at us with his obtrusive *thoughts*, his "good belief," he would have to learn that we do not at all *need* to become what we do not like to become.

And so it goes on, far beyond the most pious of the pious. "If all men were rational, if all did right, if all were guided by philanthropy, etc."! Reason, right, philanthropy, are put before the eyes of men as their calling, as the goal of their aspiration. And what does being rational mean? Giving oneself a hearing?(108) No, reason is a book full of laws, which are all enacted against egoism.

History hitherto is the history of the *intellectual* man. After the period of sensuality, history proper begins; *i.e.* the period of intellectuality,(109) spirituality,(110) non-sensuality, supersensuality, nonsensicality. Man now begins to want to be and become *something*. What? Good, beautiful, true; more precisely, moral, pious, agreeable, etc. He wants to make of himself a "proper man," "something proper." *Man* is his goal, his ought, his destiny, calling, task, his -- *ideal*; he is to himself a future, otherworldly he. And *what* makes a "proper fellow" of him? Being true, being good, being moral, etc. Now he looks askance at every one who does not recognize the same "what," seek the same morality, have the same faith, he chases out "separatists, heretics, sects," etc.

No sheep, no dog, exerts itself to become a "proper sheep, a proper dog"; no beast has its essence appear to it as a task, *i.e.* as a concept that it has to realize. It realizes itself in living itself out, in dissolving itself, passing away. It does not ask to be or to become anything *other* than it is.

Do I mean to advise you to be like the beasts? That you ought to become beasts is an exhortation which I certainly cannot give you, as that would again be a task, an ideal ("How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour. In works of labor or of skill I would be busy too, for Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do"). It would be the same, too, as if one wished for the beasts that they should become human beings. Your nature is, once for all, a human one; you are human natures, human beings. But, just because you already are so, you do not still need to become so. Beasts too are "trained," and a trained beast executes many unnatural things. But a trained dog is no better for itself than a natural one, and has no profit from it, even if it is more companionable for us.

Exertions to "form" all men into moral, rational, pious, human, "beings" (*i.e.* training) were in vogue from of yore. They are wrecked against the indomitable quality of I, against own nature, against egoism. Those who are trained never attain their ideal, and only profess with their *mouth* the sublime principles, or make a *profession*, a profession of faith. In face of this profession they must in *life* "acknowledge themselves sinners altogether," and they fall short of their ideal, are "weak men," and bear with them the consciousness of "human weakness."

It is different if you do not chase after an *ideal* as your "destiny," but dissolve yourself as time dissolves everything. The dissolution is not your "destiny," because it is present time.

Yet the *culture*, the religiousness, of men has assuredly made them free, but only free from one lord, to lead them to another. I have learned by religion to tame my appetite, I break the world's resistance by the cunning that is put in my hand by *science*; I even serve no man; "I am no man's lackey." But then it comes. You must obey God more than man. Just so I am indeed free from irrational determination by my impulses. but obedient to the master *Reason*. I have gained "spiritual freedom," "freedom of the spirit." But with that I have then become subject to that very *spirit*. The spirit gives me orders, reason guides me, they are my leaders and commanders. The "rational," the "servants of the spirit," rule. But, if *I* am not flesh, I am in truth not spirit either. Freedom of the spirit is servitude of me, because I am more than spirit or flesh.

Without doubt culture has made me *powerful*. It has given me power over all *motives*, over the impulses of my nature as well as over the exactions and violences of the world. I know, and have gained the force for it by culture, that I need not let myself be coerced by any of my appetites, pleasures, emotions, etc.; I am their -- *master*; in like manner I become, through the sciences and arts, the *master* of the refractory world, whom sea and earth obey, and to whom even the stars must give an account of themselves. The spirit has made me *master. --* But I have no power over the spirit itself. From religion (culture) I do learn the means for the "vanquishing of the world," but not how I am to subdue *God* too and become master of him; for God "is the spirit." And this same spirit, of which I am unable to become master, may have the most manifold shapes; he may be called God or National Spirit, State, Family, Reason, also -- Liberty, Humanity, Man.

*I* receive with thanks what the centuries of culture have acquired for me; I am not willing to throw away and give up anything of it: I have not lived in vain. The experience that I have *power* over my nature, and need not be the slave of my appetites, shall not be lost to me; the experience that I can subdue the world by culture's means is too dear- bought for me to be able to forget it. But I want still more.

People ask, what can man do? What can he accomplish? What goods procure, and put down the highest of everything as a calling. As if everything were possible to *me!*

If one sees somebody going to ruin in a mania, a passion, etc. (*e. g.* in the huckster-spirit, in jealousy), the desire is stirred to deliver him out of this possession and to help him to "self-conquest." "We want to make a man of him!" That would be very fine if another possession were not immediately put in the place of the earlier one. But one frees from the love of money him who is a thrall to it, only to deliver him over to piety, humanity, or some principle else, and to transfer him to a *fixed standpoint* anew.

This transference from a narrow standpoint to a sublime one is declared in the words that the sense must not be directed to the perishable, but to the imperishable alone: not to the temporal, but to the eternal, absolute, divine, purely human, etc. -- to the spiritual.

People very soon discerned that it was not indifferent what one set his affections on, or what one occupied himself with; they recognized the importance of the *object*. An object exalted above the individuality of things is the *essence* of things; yes, the essence is alone the thinkable in them. it is for the *thinking* man. Therefore direct no longer your *sense* to the *things*, but your *thoughts* to the *essence*. "Blessed are they who see not, and yet believe"; *i. e.*, blessed are the *thinkers*, for they have to do with the invisible and believe in it. Yet even an object of thought, that constituted an essential point of contention centuries long, comes at last to the point of being "No longer worth speaking of." This was discerned, but nevertheless people always kept before their eyes again a self-valid importance of the object, an absolute value of it, as if the doll were not the most important thing to the child, the Koran to the Turk. As long as I am not the sole important thing to myself, it is indifferent of what object I "make much," and only my greater or lesser *delinquency* against it is of value. The degree of my attachment and devotion marks the standpoint of my liability to service, the degree of my sinning shows the measure of my ownness.

But finally, and in general, one must know how to "put everything out of his mind," if only so as to be able to -- go to sleep. Nothing may occupy us with which *we* do not occupy ourselves: the victim of ambition cannot run away from his ambitious plans, nor the God-fearing man from the thought of God; infatuation and possessedness coincide.

To want to realize his essence or live comfortably to his concept (which with believers in God signifies as much as to be "pious," and with believers in humanity means living "humanly") is what only the sensual and sinful man can propose to himself, the man so long as he has the anxious choice between happiness of sense and peace of soul, so long as he is a "poor sinner." The Christian is nothing but a sensual man who, knowing of the sacred and being conscious that he violates it, sees in himself a poor sinner: sensualness, recognized as "sinfulness," is Christian consciousness, is the Christian himself. And if "sin" and "sinfulness" are now no longer taken into the mouths of moderns, but, instead of that, "egoism," "self-seeking," "selfishness," etc., engage them; if the devil has been translated into the "un-man" or "egoistic man" -- is the Christian less present then than before? Is not the old discord between good and evil -- is not a judge over us, man -- is not a calling, the calling to make oneself man -- left? If they no longer name it calling, but "task" or, very likely, "duty," the change of name is quite correct, because "man" is not, like God, a personal being that can "call"; but outside the name the thing remains as of old.

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Every one has a relation to objects, and more, every one is differently related to them. Let us choose as an example that book to which millions of men had a relation for two thousand years, the Bible. What is it, what was it, to each? Absolutely, only what he *made out of it!* For him who makes to himself nothing at all out of it, it is nothing at all; for him who uses it as an amulet, it has solely the value, the significance, of a means of sorcery; for him who, like children, plays with it, it is nothing but a plaything, etc.

Now, Christianity asks that it shall *be the same for all*: say the sacred book or the "sacred Scriptures." This means as much as that the Christian's view shall also be that of other men, and that no one may be otherwise related to that object. And with this the ownness of the relation is destroyed, and one mind, one disposition, is fixed as the "true", the "only true" one. In the limitation of the freedom to make of the Bible what I will, the freedom of making in general is limited; and the coercion of a view or a judgment is put in its place. He who should pass the judgment that the Bible was a long error of mankind would judge -- *criminally*.

In fact, the child who tears it to pieces or plays with it, the Inca Atahualpa who lays his ear to it and throws it away contemptuously when it remains dumb, judges just as correctly about the Bible as the priest who praises in it the "Word of God," or the critic who calls it a job of men's hands. For how we toss things about is the affair of our *option*, our *free will*: we use them according to our *heart's pleasure*, or, more clearly, we use them just as we *can*. Why, what do the parsons scream about when they see how Hegel and the speculative theologians make speculative thoughts out of the contents of the Bible? Precisely this, that they deal with it according to their heart's pleasure, or "proceed arbitrarily with it."

But, because we all show ourselves arbitrary in the handling of objects, *i.e.* do with them as we *like* best, at our *liking* (the philosopher likes nothing so well as when he can trace out an "idea" in everything, as the God-fearing man likes to make God his friend by everything, and so, *e. g.*, by keeping the Bible sacred), therefore we nowhere meet such grievous arbitrariness, such a frightful tendency to violence, such stupid coercion, as in this very domain of our -- *own free will*. If *we* proceed arbitrarily in taking the sacred objects thus or so, how is it then that we want to take it ill of the parson-spirits if they take us just as arbitrarily, *in their fashion*, and esteem us worthy of the heretic's fire or of another punishment, perhaps of the -- censorship?

What a man is, he makes out of things; "as you look at the world, so it looks at you again." Then the wise advice makes itself heard again at once, You must only look at it "rightly, unbiasedly," etc. As if the child did not look at the Bible "rightly and unbiasedly" when it makes it a plaything. That shrewd precept is given us, *e. g.* by Feuerbach. One does look at things rightly when one makes of them what one *will* (by things objects in general are here understood, *e. g.* God, our fellowmen, a sweetheart, a book, a beast, etc.). And therefore the things and the looking at them are not first, but I am, my will is. One *will* brings thoughts out of the things, *will* discover reason in the world, *will* have sacredness in it: therefore one shall find them. "Seek and ye shall find." *What* I will seek, I determine: I want, *e. g.*, to get edification from the Bible; it is to be found; I want to read and test the Bible thoroughly; my outcome will be a thorough instruction and criticism -- to the extent of my powers. I elect for myself what I have a fancy for, and in electing I show myself -- arbitrary.

Connected with this is the discernment that every judgment which I pass upon an object is the *creature* of my will; and that discernment again leads me to not losing myself in the *creature*, the judgment, but remaining the *creator*, the judge, who is ever creating anew. All predicates of objects are my statements, my judgments, my -- creatures. If they want to tear themselves loose from me and be something for themselves, or actually overawe me, then I have nothing more pressing to do than to take them back into their nothing, into me the creator. God, Christ, Trinity, morality, the good, etc., are such creatures, of which I must not merely allow myself to say that they are truths, but also that they are deceptions. As I once willed and decreed their existence, so I want to have license to will their non- existence too; I must not let them grow over my head, must not have the weakness to let them become something "absolute," whereby they would be eternalized and withdrawn from my power and decision. With that I should fall a prey to the *principle of stability*, the proper life-principle of religion, which concerns itself with creating "sanctuaries that must not be touched," "eternal truths" -- in short, that which shall be "sacred" -- and depriving you of what is *yours*.

The object makes us into possessed men in its sacred form just as in its profane, as a supersensuous object, just as it does as a sensuous one. The appetite or mania refers to both, and avarice and longing for heaven stand on a level. When the rationalists wanted to win people for the sensuous world, Lavater preached the longing for the invisible. The one party wanted to call forth *emotion*, the other *motion*, activity.

The conception of objects is altogether diverse, even as God, Christ, the world, were and are conceived of in the most manifold wise. In this every one is a "dissenter," and after bloody combats so much has at last been attained, that opposite views about one and the same object are no longer condemned as heresies worthy of death. The "dissenters" reconcile themselves to each other. But why should I only dissent (think otherwise) about a thing? Why not push the thinking otherwise to its last extremity, that of no longer having any regard at all for the thing, and therefore thinking its nothingness, crushing it? Then the *conception* itself has an end, because there is no longer anything to conceive of. Why am I to say, let us suppose, "God is not Allah, not Brahma, not Jehovah, but -- God"; but not, "God is nothing but a deception"? Why do people brand me if I am an "atheist"? Because they put the creature above the creator ("They honor and serve the creature more than the Creator"(111)) and require a *ruling object*, that the subject may be right *submissive*. I am to bend *beneath* the absolute, I *ought* to.

By the "realm of thoughts" Christianity has completed itself; the thought is that inwardness in which all the world's lights go out, all existence becomes existenceless, the inward. man (the heart, the head) is all in all. This realm of thoughts awaits its deliverance, awaits, like the Sphinx, Oedipus's key- word to the riddle, that it may enter in at last to its death. I am the annihilator of its continuance, for in the creator's realm it no longer forms a realm of its own, not a State in the State, but a creature of my creative -- thoughtlessness. Only together and at the same time with the benumbed *thinking* world can the world of Christians, Christianity and religion itself, come to its downfall; only when thoughts run out are there no more believers. To the thinker his thinking is a "sublime labor, a sacred activity," and it rests on a firm *faith*, the faith in truth. At first praying is a sacred activity, then this sacred "devotion" passes over into a rational and reasoning "thinking," which, however, likewise retains in the "sacred truth" its underangeable basis of faith, and is only a marvelous machine that the spirit of truth winds up for its service. Free thinking and free science busy *me* -- for it is not I that am free, not *I* that busy myself, but thinking is free and busies me -- with heaven and the heavenly or "divine"; *e. g.*, properly, with the world and the worldly, not this world but "another" world; it is only the reversing and deranging of the world, a busying with the *essence* of the world, therefore a *derangement*. The thinker is blind to the immediateness of things, and incapable of mastering them: he does not eat, does not drink, does not enjoy; for the eater and drinker is never the thinker, nay, the latter forgets eating and drinking, his getting on in life, the cares of nourishment, etc., over his thinking; he forgets it as the praying man too forgets it. This is why he appears to the forceful son of nature as a queer Dick, a *fool --* even if he does look upon him as holy, just as lunatics appeared so to the ancients. Free thinking is lunacy, because it is *pure movement of the inwardness*, of the merely *inward man*, which guides and regulates the rest of the man. The shaman and the speculative philosopher mark the bottom and top rounds on the ladder of the *inward* man, the -- Mongol. Shaman and philosopher fight with ghosts, demons, *spirits*, gods.

Totally different from this *free* thinking is *own* thinking, *my* thinking, a thinking which does not guide me, but is guided, continued, or broken off, by me at my pleasure. The distinction of this own thinking from free thinking is similar to that of own sensuality, which I satisfy at pleasure, from free, unruly sensuality to which I succumb.

Feuerbach, in the *Principles of the Philosophy of the Future*, is always harping upon *being*. In this he too, with all his antagonism to Hegel and the absolute philosophy, is stuck fast in abstraction; for "being" is abstraction, as is even "the I." Only *I am* not abstraction alone: *I am* all in all, consequently even abstraction or nothing; I am all and nothing; I am not a mere thought, but at the same time I am full of thoughts, a thought-world. Hegel condemns the own, mine,(112) -- "opinion."(113) "Absolute thinking" is that which forgets that it is *my* thinking, that *I* think, and that it exists only through *me*. But I, as I, swallow up again what is mine, am its master; it is only my *opinion*, which I can at any moment *change*, *i.e.* annihilate, take back into myself, and consume. Feuerbach wants to smite Hegel's "absolute thinking" with *unconquered being*. But in me being is as much conquered as thinking is. It is *my* being, as the other is *my* thinking.

With this, of course, Feuerbach does not get further than to the proof, trivial in itself, that I require the *senses* for everything, or that I cannot entirely do without these organs. Certainly I cannot think if I do not exist sensuously. But for thinking as well as for feeling, and so for the abstract as well as for the sensuous, I need above all things *myself*, this quite particular myself, this *unique* myself. If I were not this one, *e. g.* Hegel, I should not look at the world as I do look at it, I should not pick out of it that philosophical system which just I as Hegel do, etc. I should indeed have senses, as do other people too, but I should not utilize them as I do.

Thus the reproach is brought up against Hegel by Feuerbach(114) that he misuses language, understanding by many words something else than what natural consciousness takes them for; and yet he too commits the same fault when he gives the "sensuous" a sense of unusual eminence. Thus it is said, p. 69, "the sensuous is not the profane, the destitute of thought, the obvious, that which is understood of itself." But, if it is the sacred, the full of thought, the recondite, that which can be understood only through mediation -- well, then it is no longer what people call the sensuous. The sensuous is only that which exists for *the senses*; what, on the other hand, is enjoyable only to those who enjoy with *more* than the senses, who go beyond sense-enjoyment or sense-reception, is at most mediated or introduced by the senses, *i. e.*, the senses constitute a *condition* for obtaining it, but it is no longer anything sensuous. The sensuous, whatever it may be, when taken up into me becomes something non-sensuous, which, however, may again have sensuous effects, *e. g.* as by the stirring of my emotions and my blood.

It is well that Feuerbach brings sensuousness to honor, but the only thing he is able to do with it is to clothe the materialism of his "new philosophy" with what had hitherto been the property of idealism, the "absolute philosophy." As little as people let it be talked into them that one can live on the "spiritual" alone without bread, so little will they believe his word that as a sensuous being one is already everything, and so spiritual, full of thoughts, etc.

Nothing at all is justified by *being*. What is thought of *is* as well as what is not thought of; the stone in the street *is*, and my notion of it *is* too. Both are only in different *spaces*, the former in airy space, the latter in my head, in *me*; for I am space like the street.

The professionals, the privileged, brook no freedom of thought, *i.e.* no thoughts that do not come from the "Giver of all good," be he called God, pope, church, or whatever else. If anybody has such illegitimate thoughts, he must whisper them into his confessor's ear, and have himself chastised by him till the slave-whip becomes unendurable to the free thoughts. In other ways too the professional spirit takes care that free thoughts shall not come at all: first and foremost, by a wise education. He on whom the principles of morality have been duly inculcated never becomes free again from moralizing thoughts, and robbery, perjury, overreaching, etc., remain to him fixed ideas against which no freedom of thought protects him. He has his thoughts "from above," and gets no further.

It is different with the holders of concessions or patents. Every one must be able to have and form thoughts as he will. If he has the patent, or the concession, of a capacity to think, he needs no special *privilege*. But, as "all men are rational," it is free to every one to put into his head any thoughts whatever, and, to the extent of the patent of his natural endowment, to have a greater or less wealth of thoughts. Now one hears the admonitions that one "is to honor all opinions and convictions," that "every conviction is authorized," that one must be "tolerant to the views of others," etc.

But "your thoughts are not my thoughts, and your ways are not my ways." Or rather, I mean the reverse: Your thoughts are *my* thoughts, which I dispose of as I will, and which I strike down unmercifully; they are my property, which I annihilate as I list. I do not wait for authorization from you first, to decompose and blow away your thoughts. It does not matter to me that you call these thoughts yours too, they remain mine nevertheless, and how I will proceed with them is *my affair*, not a usurpation. It may please me to leave you in your thoughts; then I keep still. Do you believe thoughts fly around free like birds, so that every one may get himself some which he may then make good against me as his inviolable property? What is flying around is all -- *mine*.

Do you believe you have your thoughts for yourselves and need answer to no one for them, or as you do also say, you have to give an account of them to God only? No, your great and small thoughts belong to me, and I handle them at my pleasure.

The thought is my *own* only when I have no misgiving about bringing it in danger of death every moment, when I do not have to fear its loss as a *loss for me*, a loss of me. The thought is my own only when I can indeed subjugate it, but it never can subjugate me, never fanaticizes me, makes me the tool of its realization.

So freedom of thought exists when I can have all possible thoughts; but the thoughts become property only by not being able to become masters. In the time of freedom of thought, thoughts (ideas) *rule*; but, if I attain to property in thought, they stand as my creatures.

If the hierarchy had not so penetrated men to the innermost as to take from them all courage to pursue free thoughts, *e. g.*, thoughts perhaps displeasing to God, one would have to consider freedom of thought just as empty a word as, say, a freedom of digestion.

According to the professionals' opinion, the thought is *given* to me; according to the freethinkers', I *seek* the thought. There the *truth* is already found and extant, only I must -- receive it from its Giver by grace; here the truth is to be sought and is my goal, lying in the future, toward which I have to run.

In both cases the truth (the true thought) lies outside me, and I aspire to *get* it, be it by presentation (grace), be it by earning (merit of my own). Therefore, (1) The truth is a *privilege*; (2) No, the way to it is patent to all, and neither the Bible nor the holy fathers nor the church nor any one else is in possession of the truth; but one can come into possession of it by -- speculating.

Both, one sees, are *property-less* in relation to the truth: they have it either as a *fief* (for the "holy father," *e. g.* is not a unique person; as unique he is this Sixtus, Clement, but he does not have the truth as Sixtus, Clement, but as "holy father," *i.e.* as a spirit) or as an *ideal*. As a fief, it is only for a few (the privileged); as an ideal, for *all* (the patentees).

Freedom of thought, then, has the meaning that we do indeed all walk in the dark and in the paths of error, but every one can on this path approach *the truth* and is accordingly on the right path ("All roads lead to Rome, to the world's end, etc."). Hence freedom of thought means this much, that the true thought is not my *own*; for, if it were this, how should people want to shut me off from it?

Thinking has become entirely free, and has laid down a lot of truths which I must accommodate myself to. It seeks to complete itself into a *system* and to bring itself to an absolute "constitution." In the State *e. g.* it seeks for the idea, say, till it has brought out the "rational State," in which I am then obliged to be suited; in man (anthropology), till it "has found man."

The thinker is distinguished from the believer only by believing much more than the latter, who on his part thinks of much less as signified by his faith (creed). The thinker has a thousand tenets of faith where the believer gets along with few; but the former brings *coherence* into his tenets, and takes the coherence in turn for the scale to estimate their worth by. If one or the other does not fit into his budget, he throws it out.

The thinkers run parallel to the believers in their pronouncements. Instead of "If it is from God you will not root it out," the word is "If it is from the *truth*, is true, etc."; instead of "Give God the glory" -- "Give truth the glory." But it is very much the same to me whether God or the truth wins; first and foremost I want to win.

Aside from this, how is an "unlimited freedom" to be thinkable inside of the State or society? The State may well protect one against another, but yet it must not let itself be endangered by an unmeasured freedom, a so-called unbridledness. Thus in "freedom of instruction" the *State* declares only this -- that it is suited with every one who instructs as the State (or, speaking more comprehensibly, the political power) would have it. The point for the competitors is this "as the State would have it." If the clergy, *e. g.*, does not will as the State does, then it itself excludes itself from *competition* (*vid.* France). The limit that is necessarily drawn in the State for any and all competition is called "the oversight and superintendence of the State." In bidding freedom of instruction keep within the due bounds, the State at the same time fixes the scope of freedom of thought; because, as a rule, people do not think farther than their teachers have thought.

Hear Minister Guizot: "The great difficulty of today is the *guiding and dominating of the mind*. Formerly the church fulfilled this mission; now it is not adequate to it. It is from the university that this great service must be expected, and the university will not fail to perform it. We, the *government*, have the duty of supporting it therein. The charter calls for the freedom of thought and that of conscience."(115) So, in favor of freedom of thought and conscience, the minister demands "the guiding and dominating of the mind."

Catholicism haled the examinee before the forum of ecclesiasticism, Protestantism before that of biblical Christianity. It would be but little bettered if one haled him before that of reason, as Ruge, *e. g.*, wants to.(116) Whether the church, the Bible, or reason (to which, moreover, Luther and Huss already appealed) is the *sacred authority* makes no difference in essentials.

The "question of our time" does not become soluble even when one puts it thus: Is anything general authorized, or only the individual? Is the generality (*e. g.* State, law, custom, morality, etc.) authorized, or individuality? It becomes soluble for the first time when one no longer asks after an "authorization" at all, and does not carry on a mere fight against "privileges." -- A "rational" freedom of teaching, which recognizes only the conscience of reason,"(117)does not bring us to the goal; we require an *egoistic* freedom of teaching rather, a freedom of teaching for all ownness, wherein *I* become audible and can announce myself unchecked. That I make myself *"audible"*,(118) this alone is "reason,"(119) be I ever so irrational; in my making myself heard, and so hearing myself, others as well as I myself enjoy me, and at the same time consume me.

What would be gained if, as formerly the orthodox I, the loyal I, the moral I, etc., was free, now the rational I should become free? Would this be the freedom of me?

If I am free as "rational I," then the rational in me, or reason, is free; and this freedom of reason, or freedom of the thought, was the ideal of the Christian world from of old. They wanted to make thinking -- and, as aforesaid, faith is also thinking, as thinking is faith -- free; the thinkers, *i.e.* the believers as well as the rational, were to be free; for the rest freedom was impossible. But the freedom of thinkers is the "freedom of the children of God," and at the same time the most merciless --hierarchy or dominion of the thought; for *I* succumb to the thought. If thoughts are free, I am their slave; I have no power over them, and am dominated by them. But I want to have the thought, want to be full of thoughts, but at the same time I want to be thoughtless, and, instead of freedom of thought, I preserve for myself thoughtlessness.

If the point is to have myself understood and to make communications, then assuredly I can make use only of *human* means, which are at my command because I am at the same time man. And really I have thoughts only as *man*; as I, I am at the same time *thoughtless.*(120) He who cannot get rid of a thought is so far *only* man, is a thrall of *language*, this human institution, this treasury of *human* thoughts. Language or "the word" tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of *fixed ideas*. Just observe yourself in the act of reflection, right now, and you will find how you make progress only by becoming thoughtless and speechless every moment. You are not thoughtless and speechless merely in (say) sleep, but even in the deepest reflection; yes, precisely then most so. And only by this thoughtlessness, this unrecognized "freedom of thought" or freedom from the thought, are you your own. Only from it do you arrive at putting language to use as your *property*.

If thinking is not *my* thinking, it is merely a spun-out thought; it is slave work, or the work of a "servant obeying at the word." For not a thought, but I, am the beginning for my thinking, and therefore I am its goal too, even as its whole course is only a course of my self-enjoyment; for absolute or free thinking, on the other hand, thinking itself is the beginning, and it plagues itself with propounding this beginning as the extremest "abstraction" (*e. g.* as being). This very abstraction, or this thought, is then spun out further.

Absolute thinking is the affair of the human spirit, and this is a holy spirit. Hence this thinking is an affair of the parsons, who have "a sense for it," a sense for the "highest interests of mankind," for "the spirit."

To the believer, truths are a *settled* thing, a fact; to the freethinker, a thing that is still to be *settled*. Be absolute thinking ever so unbelieving, its incredulity has its limits, and there does remain a belief in the truth, in the spirit, in the idea and its final victory: this thinking does not sin against the holy spirit. But all thinking that does not sin against the holy spirit is belief in spirits or ghosts.

I can as little renounce thinking as feeling, the spirit's activity as little as the activity of the senses. As feeling is our sense for things, so thinking is our sense for essences (thoughts). Essences have their existence in everything sensuous, especially in the word. The power of words follows that of things: first one is coerced by the rod, afterward by conviction. The might of things overcomes our courage, our spirit; against the power of a conviction, and so of the word, even the rack and the sword lose their overpoweringness and force. The men of conviction are the priestly men, who resist every enticement of Satan.

Christianity took away from the things of this world only their irresistibleness, made us independent of them. In like manner I raise myself above truths and their power: as I am supersensual, so I am supertrue. *Before me* truths are as common and as indifferent as things; they do not carry me away, and do not inspire me with enthusiasm. There exists not even one truth, not right, not freedom, humanity, etc., that has stability before me, and to which I subject myself. They are *words*, nothing but words, as to the Christian nothing but "vain things." In words and truths (every word is a truth, as Hegel asserts that one cannot *tell* a lie) there is no salvation for me, as little as there is for the Christian in things and vanities. As the riches of this world do not make me happy, so neither do its truths. It is now no longer Satan, but the spirit, that plays the story of the temptation; and he does not seduce by the things of this world, but by its thoughts, by the "glitter of the idea."

Along with worldly goods, all sacred goods too must be put away as no longer valuable.

Truths are phrases, ways of speaking, words (lógos); brought into connection, or into an articulate series, they form logic, science, philosophy.

For thinking and speaking I need truths and words, as I do foods for eating; without them I cannot think nor speak. Truths are men's thoughts, set down in words and therefore just as extant as other things, although extant only for the mind or for thinking. They are human institutions and human creatures, and, even if they are given out for divine revelations, there still remains in them the quality of alienness for me; yes, as my own creatures they are already alienated from me after the act of creation.

The Christian man is the man with faith in thinking, who believes in the supreme dominion of thoughts and wants to bring thoughts, so-called "principles," to dominion. Many a one does indeed test the thoughts, and chooses none of them for his master without criticism, but in this he is like the dog who sniffs at people to smell out "his master"; he is always aiming at the *ruling* thought. The Christian may reform and revolt an infinite deal, may demolish the ruling concepts of centuries; he will always aspire to a new "principle" or new master again, always set up a higher or "deeper" truth again, always call forth a cult again, always proclaim a spirit called to dominion, lay down a *law* for all.

If there is even one truth only to which man has to devote his life and his powers because he is man, then he is subjected to a rule, dominion, law; he is a servingman. It is supposed that, *e. g.* man, humanity, liberty, etc., are such truths.

On the other hand, one can say thus: Whether you will further occupy yourself with thinking depends on you; only know that, *if* in your thinking you would like to make out anything worthy of notice, many hard problems are to be solved, without vanquishing which you cannot get far. There exists, therefore, no duty and no calling for you to meddle with thoughts (ideas, truths); but, if you will do so, you will do well to utilize what the forces of others have already achieved toward clearing up these difficult subjects.

Thus, therefore, he who will think does assuredly have a task, which *he* consciously or unconsciously sets for himself in willing that; but no one has the task of thinking or of believing. In the former case it may be said, "You do not go far enough, you have a narrow and biased interest, you do not go to the bottom of the thing; in short, you do not completely subdue it. But, on the other hand, however far you may come at any time, you are still always at the end, you have no call to step farther, and you can have it as you will or as you are able. It stands with this as with any other piece of work, which you can give up when the humor for it wears off. Just so, if you can no longer *believe* a thing, you do not have to force yourself into faith or to busy yourself lastingly as if with a sacred truth of the faith, as theologians or philosophers do, but you can tranquilly draw back your interest from it and let it run. Priestly spirits will indeed expound this your lack of interest as "laziness, thoughtlessness, obduracy, self-deception," etc. But do you just let the trumpery lie, notwithstanding. No thing,(121) no so-called "highest interest of mankind," no "sacred cause,"(122) is worth your serving it, and occupying yourself with it for *its sake*; you may seek its worth in this alone, whether it is worth anything to *you* for your sake. Become like children, the biblical saying admonishes us. But children have no sacred interest and know nothing of a "good cause." They know all the more accurately what they have a fancy for; and they think over, to the best of their powers, how they are to arrive at it.

Thinking will as little cease as feeling. But the power of thoughts and ideas, the dominion of theories and principles, the sovereignty of the spirit, in short the -- *hierarchy*, lasts as long as the parsons, *i.e.*, theologians, philosophers, statesmen, philistines, liberals, schoolmasters, servants, parents, children, married couples, Proudhon, George Sand, Bluntschli, etc., etc., have the floor; the hierarchy will endure as long as people believe in, think of, or even criticize, principles; for even the most inexorable criticism, which undermines all current principles, still does finally *believe in the principle*.

Every one criticises, but the criterion is different. People run after the "right" criterion. The right criterion is the first presupposition. The critic starts from a proposition, a truth, a belief. This is not a creation of the critic, but of the dogmatist; nay, commonly it is actually taken up out of the culture of the time without further ceremony, like *e. g.* "liberty," "humanity," etc. The critic has not "discovered man," but this truth has been established as "man" by the dogmatist, and the critic (who, besides, may be the same person with him) believes in this truth, this article of faith. In this faith, and possessed by this faith, he criticises.

The secret of criticism is some "truth" or other: this remains its energizing mystery.

But I distinguish between *servile* and *own* criticism. If I criticize under the presupposition of a supreme being, my criticism *serves* the being and is carried on for its sake: if *e. g.* I am possessed by the belief in a "free State," then everything that has a bearing on it I criticize from the standpoint of whether it is suitable to this State, for I *love* this State; if I criticize as a pious man, then for me everything falls into the classes of divine and diabolical, and before my criticism nature consists of traces of God or traces of the devil (hence names like Godsgift, Godmount, the Devil's Pulpit), men of believers and unbelievers; if I criticize while believing in man as the "true essence," then for me everything falls primarily into the classes of man and the un-man, etc.

Criticism has to this day remained a work of love: for at all times we exercised it for the love of some being. All servile criticism is a product of love, a possessedness, and proceeds according to that New Testament precept, "Test everything and hold fast the *good."*(123) "The good" is the touchstone, the criterion. The good, returning under a thousand names and forms, remained always the presupposition, remained the dogmatic fixed point for this criticism, remained the -- fixed idea.

The critic, in setting to work, impartially presupposes the "truth," and seeks for the truth in the belief that it is to be found. He wants to ascertain the true, and has in it that very "good."

Presuppose means nothing else than put a *thought* in front, or think something before everything else and think the rest from the starting-point of this that has *been thought*, *i.e.* measure and criticize it by this. In other words, this is as much as to say that thinking is to begin with something already thought. If thinking began at all, instead of being begun, if thinking were a subject, an acting personality of its own, as even the plant is such, then indeed there would be no abandoning the principle that thinking must begin with itself. But it is just the personification of thinking that brings to pass those innumerable errors. In the Hegelian system they always talk as if thinking or "the thinking spirit" (*i.e.* personified thinking, thinking as a ghost) thought and acted; in critical liberalism it is always said that "criticism" does this and that, or else that "self- consciousness" finds this and that. But, if thinking ranks as the personal actor, thinking itself must be presupposed; if criticism ranks as such, a thought must likewise stand in front. Thinking and criticism could be active only starting from themselves, would have to be themselves the presupposition of their activity, as without being they could not be active. But thinking, as a thing presupposed, is a fixed thought, a *dogma*; thinking and criticism, therefore, can start only from a *dogma, i. e.* from a thought, a fixed idea, a presupposition.

With this we come back again to what was enunciated above, that Christianity consists in the development of a world of thoughts, or that it is the proper "freedom of thought," the "free thought," the "free spirit." The "true" criticism, which I called "servile," is therefore just as much "free" criticism, for it is not *my own*.

The case stands otherwise when what is yours is not made into something that is of itself, not personified, not made independent as a "spirit" to itself. *Your* thinking has for a presupposition not "thinking," but *you*. But thus you do presuppose yourself after all? Yes, but not for myself, but for my thinking. Before my thinking, there is -- I. From this it follows that my thinking is not preceded by a *thought*, or that my thinking is without a "presupposition." For the presupposition which I am for my thinking is not one *made by thinking*, not one *thought of*, but it is *posited* thinking *itself*, it is the *owner* of the thought, and proves only that thinking is nothing more than -- *property*, *i. e.* that an "independent" thinking, a "thinking spirit," does not exist at all.

This reversal of the usual way of regarding things might so resemble an empty playing with abstractions that even those against whom it is directed would acquiesce in the harmless aspect I give it, if practical consequences were not connected with it.

To bring these into a concise expression, the assertion now made is that man is not the measure of all things, but I am this measure. The servile critic has before his eyes another being, an idea, which he means to serve; therefore he only slays the false idols for his God. What is done for the love of this being, what else should it be but a -- work of love? But I, when I criticize, do not even have myself before my eyes, but am only doing myself a pleasure, amusing myself according to my taste; according to my several needs I chew the thing up or only inhale its odor.

The distinction between the two attitudes will come out still more strikingly if one reflects that the servile critic, because love guides him, supposes he is serving the thing (cause) itself.

*The* truth, or "truth in general," people are bound not to give up, but to seek for. What else is it but the *Être suprême*, the highest essence? Even "true criticism" would have to despair if it lost faith in the truth. And yet the truth is only a -- *thought*; but it is not merely "a" thought, but the thought that is above all thoughts, the irrefragable thought; it is *the* thought itself, which gives the first hallowing to all others; it is the consecration of thoughts, the "absolute," the "sacred" thought. The truth wears longer than all the gods; for it is only in the truth's service, and for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods and at last God himself. "The truth" outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory world of gods, it is Deity itself.

I will answer Pilate's question, What is truth? Truth is the free thought, the free idea, the free spirit; truth is what is free from you, what is not your own, what is not in your power. But truth is also the completely unindependent, impersonal, unreal, and incorporeal; truth cannot step forward as you do, cannot move, change, develop; truth awaits and receives everything from you, and itself is only through you; for it exists only -- in your head. You concede that the truth is a thought, but say that not every thought is a true one, or, as you are also likely to express it, not every thought is truly and really a thought. And by what do you measure and recognize the thought? By *your impotence*, to wit, by your being no longer able to make any successful assault on it! When it overpowers you, inspires you, and carries you away, then you hold it to be the true one. Its dominion over you certifies to you its truth; and, when it possesses you, and you are possessed by it, then you feel well with it, for then you have found your -- *lord and master*. When you were seeking the truth, what did your heart then long for? For your master! You did not aspire to *your* might, but to a Mighty One, and wanted to exalt a Mighty One ("Exalt ye the Lord our God!"). The truth, my dear Pilate, is -- the Lord, and all who seek the truth are seeking and praising the Lord. Where does the Lord exist? Where else but in your head? He is only spirit, and, wherever you believe you really see him, there he is a -- ghost; for the Lord is merely something that is thought of, and it was only the Christian pains and agony to make the invisible visible, the spiritual corporeal, that generated the ghost and was the frightful misery of the belief in ghosts.

As long as you believe in the truth, you do not believe in yourself, and you are a -- *servant*, a -- *religious man*. You alone are the truth, or rather, you are more than the truth, which is nothing at all before you. You too do assuredly ask about the truth, you too do assuredly "criticize," but you do not ask about a "higher truth" -- to wit, one that should be higher than you -- nor criticize according to the criterion of such a truth. You address yourself to thoughts and notions, as you do to the appearances of things, only for the purpose of making them palatable to you, enjoyable to you, and your own: you want only to subdue them and become their *owner*, you want to orient yourself and feel at home in them, and you find them true, or see them in their true light, when they can no longer slip away from you, no longer have any unseized or uncomprehended place, or when they are *right for you*, when they are your *property*. If afterward they become heavier again, if they wriggle themselves out of your power again, then that is just their untruth -- to wit, your impotence. Your impotence is their power, your humility their exaltation. Their truth, therefore, is you, or is the nothing which you are for them and in which they dissolve: their truth is their *nothingness*.

Only as the property of me do the spirits, the truths, get to rest; and they then for the first time really are, when they have been deprived of their sorry existence and made a property of mine, when it is no longer said "the truth develops itself, rules, asserts itself; history (also a concept) wins the victory," etc. The truth never has won a victory, but was always my *means* to the victory, like the sword ("the sword of truth"). The truth is dead, a letter, a word, a material that I can use up. All truth by itself is dead, a corpse; it is alive only in the same way as my lungs are alive -- to wit, in the measure of my own vitality. Truths are material, like vegetables and weeds; as to whether vegetable or weed, the decision lies in me.

Objects are to me only material that I use up. Wherever I put my hand I grasp a truth, which I trim for myself. The truth is certain to me, and I do not need to long after it. To do the truth a service is in no case my intent; it is to me only a nourishment for my thinking head, as potatoes are for my digesting stomach, or as a friend is for my social heart. As long as I have the humor and force for thinking, every truth serves me only for me to work it up according to my powers. As reality or worldliness is "vain and a thing of naught" for Christians, so is the truth for me. It exists, exactly as much as the things of this world go on existing although the Christian has proved their nothingness; but it is vain, because it has its *value* not *in itself* but *in me. Of itself* it is *valueless*. The truth is a -- *creature*.

As you produce innumerable things by your activity, yes, shape the earth's surface anew and set up works of men everywhere, so too you may still ascertain numberless truths by your thinking, and we will gladly take delight in them. Nevertheless, as I do not please to hand myself over to serve your newly discovered machines mechanically, but only help to set them running for my benefit, so too I will only use your truths, without letting myself be used for their demands.

All truths *beneath* me are to my liking; a truth *above* me, a truth that I should have to *direct* myself by, I am not acquainted with. For me there is no truth, for nothing is more than I! Not even my essence, not even the essence of man, is more than I! than I, this "drop in the bucket," this "insignificant man"!

You believe that you have done the utmost when you boldly assert that, because every time has its own truth, there is no "absolute truth." Why, with this you nevertheless still leave to each time its truth, and thus you quite genuinely create an "absolute truth," a truth that no time lacks, because every time, however its truth may be, still has a "truth."

Is it meant only that people have been thinking in every time, and so have had thoughts or truths, and that in the subsequent time these were other than they were in the earlier? No, the word is to be that every time had its "truth of faith"; and in fact none has yet appeared in which a "higher truth" has not been recognized, a truth that people believed they must subject themselves to as "highness and majesty."

Every truth of a time is its fixed idea, and, if people later found another truth, this always happened only because they sought for another; they only reformed the folly and put a modern dress on it. For they did want -- who would dare doubt their justification for this? -- they wanted to be "inspired by an idea." They wanted to be dominated -- possessed, by a *thought*! The most modern ruler of this kind is "our essence," or "man."

For all free criticism a thought was the criterion; for own criticism I am, I the unspeakable, and so not the merely thought-of; for what is merely thought of is always speakable, because word and thought coincide. That is true which is mine, untrue that whose own I am; true, *e. g.* the union; untrue, the State and society. "Free and true" criticism takes care for the consistent dominion of a thought, an idea, a spirit; "own" criticism, for nothing but my *self-enjoyment*. But in this the latter is in fact -- and we will not spare it this "ignominy"! -- like the bestial criticism of instinct. I, like the criticizing beast, am concerned only for *myself*, not "for the cause." I am the criterion of truth, but I am not an idea, but more than idea, *e. g.*, unutterable. *My criticism* is not a "free" criticism, not free from me, and not "servile," not in the service of an idea, but an *own* criticism.

True or human criticism makes out only whether something is *suitable* to man, to the true man; but by own criticism you ascertain whether it is suitable to *you*.

Free criticism busies itself with *ideas*, and therefore is always theoretical. However it may rage against ideas, it still does not get clear of them. It pitches into the ghosts, but it can do this only as it holds them to be ghosts. The ideas it has to do with do not fully disappear; the morning breeze of a new day does not scare them away.

The critic may indeed come to ataraxia before ideas, but he never gets *rid* of them; *i.e.* he will never comprehend that above the *bodily man* there does not exist something higher -- to wit, liberty, his humanity, etc. He always has a "calling" of man still left, "humanity." And this idea of humanity remains unrealized, just because it is an "idea" and is to remain such.

If, on the other hand, I grasp the idea as *my* idea, then it is already realized, because I am its reality; its reality consists in the fact that I, the bodily, have it.

They say, the idea of liberty realizes itself in the history of the world. The reverse is the case; this idea is real as a man thinks it, and it is real in the measure in which it is idea, *i. e.* in which I think it or *have* it. It is not the idea of liberty that develops itself, but men develop themselves, and, of course, in this self-development develop their thinking too.

In short, the critic is not yet *owner*, because he still fights with ideas as with powerful aliens -- as the Christian is not owner of his "bad desires" so long as he has to combat them; for him who contends against vice, vice *exists*.

Criticism remains stuck fast in the "freedom of knowing," the freedom of the spirit, and the spirit gains its proper freedom when it fills itself with the pure, true idea; this is the freedom of thinking, which cannot be without thoughts.

Criticism smites one idea only by another, *e. g.* that of privilege by that of manhood, or that of egoism by that of unselfishness.

In general, the beginning of Christianity comes on the stage again in its critical end, egoism being combated here as there. I am not to make myself (the individual) count, but the idea, the general.

Why, warfare of the priesthood with *egoism*, of the spiritually minded with the worldly-minded, constitutes the substance of all Christian history. In the newest criticism this war only becomes all-embracing, fanaticism complete. Indeed, neither can it pass away till it passes thus, after it has had its life and its rage out.

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Whether what I think and do is Christian, what do I care? Whether it is human, liberal, humane, whether unhuman, illiberal, inhuman, what do I ask about that? If only it accomplishes what I want, if only I satisfy myself in it, then overlay it with predicates as you will; it is all alike to me.

Perhaps I too, in the very next moment, defend myself against my former thoughts; I too am likely to change suddenly my mode of action; but not on account of its not corresponding to Christianity, not on account of its running counter to the eternal rights of man, not on account of its affronting the idea of mankind, humanity, and humanitarianism, but -- because I am no longer all in it, because it no longer furnishes me any full enjoyment, because I doubt the earlier thought or no longer please myself in the mode of action just now practiced. As the world as property has become a *material* with which I undertake what I will, so the spirit too as property must sink down into a *material* before which I no longer entertain any sacred dread. Then, firstly, I shall shudder no more before a thought, let it appear as presumptuous and "devilish" as it will, because, if it threatens to become too inconvenient and unsatisfactory for *me*, its end lies in my power; but neither shall I recoil from any deed because there dwells in it a spirit of godlessness, immorality, wrongfulness. as little as St. Boniface pleased to desist, through religious scrupulousness, from cutting down the sacred oak of the heathens. If the *things* of the world have once become vain, the thoughts of the spirit must also become vain.

No thought is sacred, for let no thought rank as "devotions";(124) no feeling is sacred (no sacred feeling of friendship, mother's feelings, etc.), no belief is sacred. They are all *alienable*, my alienable property, and are annihilated, as they are created, by *me*.

The Christian can lose all *things* or objects, the most loved persons, these "objects" of his love, without giving up himself (*i.e.*, in the Christian sense, his spirit, his soul! as lost. The owner can cast from him all the *thoughts* that were dear to his heart and kindled his zeal, and will likewise "gain a thousandfold again," because he, their creator, remains.

Unconsciously and involuntarily we all strive toward ownness, and there will hardly be one among us who has not given up a sacred feeling, a sacred thought, a sacred belief; nay, we probably meet no one who could not still deliver himself from one or another of his sacred thoughts. All our contention against convictions starts from the opinion that maybe we are capable of driving our opponent out of his entrenchments of thought. But what I do unconsciously I half-do, and therefore after every victory over a faith I become again the *prisoner* (possessed) of a faith which then takes my whole self anew into its *service*, and makes me an enthusiast for reason after I have ceased to be enthusiastic for the Bible, or an enthusiast for the idea of humanity after I have fought long enough for that of Christianity.

Doubtless, as owner of thoughts, I shall cover my property with my shield, just as I do not, as owner of things, willingly let everybody help himself to them; but at the same time I shall look forward smilingly to the outcome of the battle, smilingly lay the shield on the corpses of my thoughts and my faith, smilingly triumph when I am beaten. That is the very humor of the thing. Every one who has "sublimer feelings" is able to vent his humor on the pettiness of men; but to let it play with all "great thoughts, sublime feelings, noble inspiration, and sacred faith" presupposes that I am the owner of all.

If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether! For we are, every moment, all that we can be; and we never need be more. Since no defect cleaves to us, sin has no meaning either. Show me a sinner in the world still, if no one any longer needs to do what suits a superior! If I only need do what suits myself, I am no sinner if I do not do what suits myself, as I do not injure in myself a "holy one"; if, on the other hand, I am to be pious, then I must do what suits God; if I am to act humanly, I must do what suits the essence of man, the idea of mankind, etc. What religion calls the "sinner," humanitarianism calls the "egoist." But, once more: if I need not do what suits any other, is the "egoist," in whom humanitarianism has borne to itself a new-fangled devil, anything more than a piece of nonsense? The egoist, before whom the humane shudder, is a spook as much as the devil is: he exists only as a bogie and phantasm in their brain. If they were not unsophisticatedly drifting back and forth in the antediluvian opposition of good and evil, to which they have given the modern names of "human" and "egoistic," they would not have freshened up the hoary "sinner" into an "egoist" either, and put a new patch on an old garment. But they could not do otherwise, for they hold it for their task to be "men." They are rid of the Good One; good is left!(125)

We are perfect altogether, and on the whole earth there is not one man who is a sinner! There are crazy people who imagine that they are God the Father, God the Son, or the man in the moon, and so too the world swarms with fools who seem to themselves to be sinners; but, as the former are not the man in the moon, so the latter are -- not sinners. Their sin is imaginary, yet, it is insidiously objected, their craziness or their possessedness is at least their sin. Their possessedness is nothing but what they -- could achieve, the result of their development, just as Luther's faith in the Bible was all that he was -- competent to make out. The one brings himself into the madhouse with his development, the other brings himself therewith into the Pantheon and to the loss of -- Valhalla.

There is no sinner and no sinful egoism!

Get away from me with your "philanthropy"! Creep in, you philanthropist, into the "dens of vice," linger awhile in the throng of the great city: will you not everywhere find sin, and sin, and again sin? Will you not wail over corrupt humanity, not lament at the monstrous egoism? Will you see a rich man without finding him pitiless and "egoistic?" Perhaps you already call yourself an atheist, but you remain true to the Christian feeling that a camel will sooner go through a needle's eye than a rich man not be an "un-man." How many do you see anyhow that you would not throw into the "egoistic mass"? What, therefore, has your philanthropy [love of man] found? Nothing but unlovable men! And where do they all come from? From you, from your philanthropy! You brought the sinner with you in your head, therefore you found him, therefore you inserted him everywhere. Do not call men sinners, and they are not: you alone are the creator of sinners; you, who fancy that you love men, are the very one to throw them into the mire of sin, the very one to divide them into vicious and virtuous, into men and un-men, the very one to befoul them with the slaver of your possessedness; for you love not *men*, but *man*. But I tell you, you have never seen a sinner, you have only -- dreamed of him.

Self-enjoyment is embittered to me by my thinking I must serve another, by my fancying myself under obligation to him, by my holding myself called to "self-sacrifice," "resignation," "enthusiasm." All right: if I no longer serve any idea, any "higher essence," then it is clear of itself that I no longer serve any man either, but -- under all circumstances -- *myself*. But thus I am not merely in fact or in being, but also for my consciousness, the -- unique.(126)

There pertains to *you* more than the divine, the human, etc.; *yours* pertains to you.

Look upon yourself as more powerful than they give you out for, and you have more power; look upon yourself as more, and you have more.

You are then not merely *called* to everything divine, *entitled* to everything human, but *owner* of what is yours, *i.e.* of all that you possess the force to make your own;(127) *i.e.* you are *appropriate*(128) and capacitated for everything that is yours.

People have always supposed that they must give me a destiny lying outside myself, so that at last they demanded that I should lay claim to the human because I am -- man. This is the Christian magic circle. Fichte's ego too is the same essence outside me, for every one is ego; and, if only this ego has rights, then it is "the ego," it is not I. But I am not an ego along with other egos, but the sole ego: I am unique. Hence my wants too are unique, and my deeds; in short, everything about me is unique. And it is only as this unique I that I take everything for my own, as I set myself to work, and develop myself, only as this. I do not develop men, nor as man, but, as I, I develop -- myself.

This is the meaning of the -- *unique one*.