doing he enters upon a line of thought in which Hume and — less historically — Kant and Schleiermacher were his forerunners. He appeals from the official documents of religion to the spiritual life which has found expression in them. His most important work in the sphere of the philosophy of religion is Das Wesen des Christerthums (1841). He however himself attaches more importance to the Theogonie which appeared in 1857.
The break with the speculative philosophy gave Feuerbach occasion to develop an entirely new conception of philosophy. After he had even insisted on an "analytico-genetic" philosophy in his elegant treatise on Pierre Bayle (1838), he announced a program for the philosophy of the future in a brief essay (Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, 1843) in which he especially emphasized the concrete distinction of every particular reality. The subject-matter of philosophy has nothing to do with the things which transcend experience, but consists entirely of man as given in experience and nature as furnishing the basis of his existence. He seeks, by painstaking studies in the natural sciences, to determine the more intimate relation between man and nature. In his last essay (Got, Freiheit und Unserblichkeit, 1866) he elaborates his view of the relation of the spiritual to the material universe. He was occupied during his last years with studies in ethics, the results of which unfortunately exist only in interesting fragments. Fr. Jodl has published a valuable monograph on Feuerbach (in Frommann's Klassikern der Philosophie).
a. According to Feuerbach the characteristic phenomena of religion arise from the fact that the impassioned aspiration towards the fullfillment of the wishes of the heart breaks through the boundaries fixed by reason.
