Hegel had transformed the transcendental world of current opinion, with its personal Deity and personal immortality, into a world of reason; and Feuerbach went a step further, and abolished what he counted the transcendency of reason itself. Heaven and God, he entirely admitted, were nothing but subjective illusions, fantastic projections of man's own being and his own real world into external spheres. But mind, an abstract entity, and reason, a universal and single principle, were, in his opinion, illusions too. There was nothing real but man--the concrete flesh and blood man who thinks and feels. "God," says Feuerbach, speaking of his mental development, "was my first thought, Reason my second, Man my third and last." He passed, as Lange points out, through Comte's three epochs. Theology was swept away, and then metaphysics, and in its room came a positive and materialistic anthropology which declared that the senses were the sole sources of real knowledge, that the body was not only part of man's being, but its totality and essence, and, in short, that man is what he eats--_Der Mensch ist was er isst_. Man, therefore, had no other God before man, and the promotion of man's happiness and culture in this earthly life--which was his only life--was the sole natural object of his political or religious interest. This system was popularized by Feuerbach's brother Friedrich, in a little work called the "Religion of the Future," which enjoyed a high authority among the German communists, and formed a kind of lectionary they read and commented on at their stated meetings. The object of the new religion is thus described in it:--"Man alone is our God, our father, our judge, our redeemer, our true home, our law and rule, the alpha and omega of our political, moral, public, and domestic life and work. There is no salvation but by man." And the cardinal articles of the faith are that human nature is holy, that the impulse to pleasure is holy, that everything which gratifies it is holy, that every man is destined and entitled to be happy, and for the attainment of this end has the right to claim the greatest possible assistance from others, and the duty to afford the same to them in turn.