[Footnote 3:  Volkelt:  The Phantasy in Dreams, 1875; Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, 1879; On the Possibility of Metaphysics, inaugural address at Basle, 1884; Experience and Thought, Critical Foundation of the Theory of Knowledge, 1886; Lectures Introductory to the Philosophy of the Present Time (delivered in Frankfort on the Main), 1892.]

The leaders of the Hegelian left require more detailed consideration.  In David Friedrich Strauss[1] (1808-74, born and died at Ludwigsburg) the philosophy of religion becomes a historical criticism of the Bible and of dogmatics.  The biblical narratives are, in great part, not history (this has been the common error alike of the super-naturalistic and of the rationalistic interpreters), but myths, that is, suprasensible facts presented in the form of history and in symbolic language.  It is evident from the contradictions in the narratives and the impossibility of miracles that we are not here concerned with actual events.  The myths possess (speculative, absolute) truth, but no (historical) reality.  They are unintentional creations of the popular imagination; the spirit of the community speaks in the authors of the Gospels, using the historical factor (the life-history of Jesus) with mythical embellishments as an investiture for a supra-historical, eternal truth (the speculative Idea of incarnation).  The God become man, in which the infinite and the finite, the divine nature and the human, are united, is the human race.  The Idea of incarnation manifests itself in a multitude of examples which supplement one another, instead of pouring forth its whole fullness in a single one.  The (real) Idea of the race is to be substituted for a single individual as the subject of the predicates (resurrection, ascension, etc.) which the Church ascribes to Christ.  The Son of God is Humanity.

[Footnote 1:  Strauss:  The Life of Jesus, 1835-36, 4th ed., 1840 [English translation by George Eliot, 2d. ed., 1893]; the same “for the German People,” 1864 [English translation, 1865]; Christian Dogmatics, 1840-41; Voltaire, 1870; Collected Writings, 12 vols., edited by Zeller, 1876-78.  On Strauss cf.  Zeller, 1874 [English, 1874], and Hausrath, 1876-78.]

In his second principal work Strauss criticises the dogmas of Christianity as sharply as he had criticised the Gospel narrative in the first one.  The historical development of these has of itself effected their destruction:  the history of dogma is the objective criticism of dogma.  Christianity and philosophy, theism and pantheism, dualism and immanence, are irreconcilable opposites.  To be able to know we must cease to believe.  Dogma is the product of the unphilosophical, uncultured consciousness; belief in revelation, only for those who have not yet risen to reason.  In the transformation of religious representations into philosophical Ideas nothing specifically representative