Feuerbach, in the "Principles of the Philosophy of the Future," is always harping upon _being_. In this he too, with all his antagonism to Hegel and the absolute philosophy, is stuck fast in abstraction; for "being" is abstraction, as is even "the I." Only _I am_ not abstraction alone: _I am_ all in all, consequently even abstraction or nothing; I am all and nothing; I am not a mere thought, but at the same time I am full of thoughts, a thought-world. Hegel condemns the own, mine,[225]--"opinion."[226] "Absolute thinking" is that thinking which forgets that it is _my_ thinking, that I think, and that it exists only through _me_. But I, as I, swallow up again what is mine, am its master; it is only my _opinion_, which I can at any moment _change_, _i. e._ annihilate, take back into myself, and consume. Feuerbach wants to smite Hegel's "absolute thinking" with _unconquered being_. But in me being is as much conquered as thinking is. It is _my_ being, as the other is _my_ thinking. With this, of course, Feuerbach does not get further than to the proof, trivial in itself, that I require the _senses_ for everything, or that I cannot entirely do without these organs. Certainly I cannot think if I do not exist sensuously. But for thinking as well as for feeling, and so for the abstract as well as for the sensuous, I need above all things _myself_, this quite particular myself, this _unique_ myself. If I were not this one, _e. g._ Hegel, I should not look at the world as I do look at it, I should not pick out of it that philosophical system which just I as Hegel do, etc. I should indeed have senses, as do other people too, but I should not utilize them as I do. Thus the reproach is brought up against Hegel by Feuerbach[227] that he misuses language, understanding by many words something else than what natural consciousness takes them for; and yet he too commits the same fault when he gives the "sensuous" a sense of unusual eminence. Thus it is said, p. 69, "the sensuous is not the profane, the destitute of thought, the obvious, that which is understood of itself." But, if it is the sacred, the full of thought, the recondite, that which can be understood only through mediation,--well, then it is no longer what people call the sensuous. The sensuous is only that which exists for _the senses_; what, on the other hand, is enjoyable only to those who enjoy with _more_ than the senses, who go beyond sense-enjoyment or sense-reception, is at most mediated or introduced by the senses, _i. e._ the senses constitute a _condition_ for obtaining it, but it is no longer anything sensuous. The sensuous, whatever it may be, when taken up into me becomes something non-sensuous, which, however, may again have sensuous effects, _e. g._ by the stirring of my emotions and my blood.