With the strength of _despair_ Feuerbach clutches at the total substance of Christianity, not to throw it away, no, to drag it to himself, to draw it, the long-yearned-for, ever-distant, out of its heaven with a last effort, and keep it by him forever. Is not that a clutch of the uttermost despair, a clutch for life or death, and is it not at the same time the Christian yearning and hungering for the other world? The hero wants not to go into the other world, but to draw the other world to him, and compel it to become this world! And since then has not all the world, with more or less consciousness, been crying that "this world" is the vital point, and heaven must come down on earth and be experienced even here?
Let us, in brief, set Feuerbach's theological view and our contradiction over against each other!
"The essence of man is man's supreme being;[15] now by religion, to be sure, the _supreme being_ is called _God_ and regarded as an _objective_ essence, but in truth it is only man's own essence; and therefore the turning point of the world's history is that henceforth no longer _God_, but man, is to appear to man as God."[16]
To this we reply: The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but, just because it is his _essence_ and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as "God," or find it in him and call it "Essence of Man" or "Man." _I_ am neither God nor _Man_,[17] neither the supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me. Nay, we really do always think of the supreme being as in both kinds of otherworldliness, the inward and outward, at once; for the "Spirit of God" is, according to the Christian view, also "our spirit," and "dwells in us."[18] It dwells in heaven and dwells in us; we poor things are just its "dwelling," and, if Feuerbach goes on to destroy its heavenly dwelling and force it to move to us bag and baggage, then we, its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded.
But after this digression (which, if we were at all proposing to work by line and level, we should have had to save for later pages in order to avoid repetition) we return to the spirit's first creation, the spirit itself.
