Now while many, as we shall immediately see, although opposed to a teleological view of the world, still are inclined to give a more or less lasting value to certain psychical processes which may be called by the name religion, Buechner, on the contrary, makes a direct attack upon everything which is thus called. He does not render it difficult for us to review his position. For, after having given it openly, but still with certain relative modifications, in different publications (especially in his book "Force and Matter," which appeared in 1855 in the first edition, and in 1872 in the twelfth) he gives it in cynical nakedness in the lectures with which he travelled through America and {189} Germany in 1872-1874, and the contents of which he has made public in his pamphlet: "Der Gottesbegriff und dessen Bedeutung in der Gegenwart" ("The Idea of God, and its Importance at the Present Time"), Leipzig, 1874, Theo. Thomas. As is said in the preface, the design of the lecture is "to give a renewed impulse to the final and definitive elimination of an idea which, according to the opinion of the author, obstructs our whole spiritual, social, and political development, as no other idea does." He means the idea of God; not merely the theistic idea of a personal God, but the idea of God in general. For even the pantheistic idea of God, which he had formerly treated with a certain polite reserve, finds in his eyes even less favor than the theistic. He says: "If the absurdity is already great enough in theism, it is possibly still greater in pantheism, which moreover has always played a great _role_ in philosophy;" and, "Christianity has but injured the spiritual and material progress of mankind." In agreement with Strauss, he sees the earliest origin of the idea of God only in ignorance and fear. "Every creating, preserving, or reigning principle in the world is done away with, and there remains as highest spiritual power present in the world only human reason. Atheism or philosophic monism alone leads to freedom, to reason, progress, acknowledgment of true humanity,--in short to humanism."