made me a present of Feuerbach’s book on Tod und Unsterblichkeit (’Death and Immortality’).  The well-known and stirring lyrical style of the author greatly fascinated me as a layman.  The intricate questions which he propounds in this book as if they were being discussed for the first time by him, and which he treats in a charmingly exhaustive manner, had often occupied my mind since the very first days of my acquaintance with Lehrs in Paris, just as they occupy the mind of every imaginative and serious man.  With me, however, this was not lasting, and I had contented myself with the poetic suggestions on these important subjects which appear here and there in the works of our great poets.

The frankness with which Feuerbach explains his views on these interesting questions, in the more mature parts of his book, pleased me as much by their tragic as by their social-radical tendencies.  It seemed right that the only true immortality should be that of sublime deeds and great works of art.  It was more difficult to sustain any interest in Das Wesen des Christenthums (’The Essence of Christianity’) by the same author, for it was impossible whilst reading this work not to become conscious, however involuntarily, of the prolix and unskilful manner in which he dilates on the simple and fundamental idea, namely, religion explained from a purely subjective and psychological point of view.  Nevertheless, from that day onward I always regarded Feuerbach as the ideal exponent of the radical release of the individual from the thraldom of accepted notions, founded on the belief in authority.  The initiated will therefore not wonder that I dedicated my Kunstwerk der Zukunft to Feuerbach and addressed its preface to him.

My friend Sulzer, a thorough disciple of Hegel, was very sorry to see me so interested in Feuerbach, whom he did not even recognise as a philosopher at all.  He said that the best thing that Feuerbach had done for me was that he had been the means of awakening my ideas, although he himself had none.  But what had really induced me to attach so much importance to Feuerbach was the conclusion by means of which he had seceded from his master Hegel, to wit, that the best philosophy was to have no philosophy—­a theory which greatly simplified what I had formerly considered a very terrifying study—­and secondly, that only that was real which could be ascertained by the senses.

The fact that he proclaimed what we call ‘spirit’ to be an aesthetic perception of our senses, together with his statement concerning the futility of philosophy—­these were the two things in him which rendered me such useful assistance in my conceptions of an all-embracing work of art, of a perfect drama which should appeal to the simplest and most purely human emotions at the very moment when it approached its fulfilment as Kunstwerk der Zukunft.  It must have been this which Sulzer had in his mind when he spoke deprecatingly of Feuerbach’s influence over me.  At all events, after a while I certainly could not return to his works, and I remember that his newly published book, Uber das Wesen der Religion (’Lectures on the Essence of Religion’), scared me to such an extent by the dullness of its title alone, that when Herwegh opened it for my benefit, I closed it with a bang under his very nose.