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STRAUSS. 591 for a single individual as the subject of the predicates (resur- rection, ascension, etc.) which the Church ascribes to Christ. The Son of God is Humanity. In his second principal work Strauss criticises the dogmas of Christianity as sharply as he had criticised the Gospel narrative in the first one. The historical development of these has of itself effected their destruction : the history of dogma is the objective criticism of dogma. Christianity and philosophy, theism and pantheism, dualism and immanence, are irreconcilable opposites. To be able to know we must cease to believe. Dogma is the product of the unphiloso- phical, uncultured consciousness; belief in revelation, only for those who have not yet risen to reason. In the trans- formation of religious representations into philosophical Ideas nothing specifically representative is left ; the form of representation must be actually overcome. The Christian contraposition of the present world and that which is beyond is explained by the fact that the sensuo-rational spirit of man, so long as it does not philosophically know itself as the unity of the infinite and the finite, but only feels itself as finite, sensuo-empirical consciousness, projects the infinite, which it has in itself, as though this were some- thing foreign, looks on it as something beyond the world. This separation of faith is entirely unphilosophical ; it is the mission of the philosopher to reduce all that is beyond the world to the present. Thus for him immortality is not some- thing to come, but the spirit's own power to rise above the finite to the Idea. And like future existence, so the tran- scendent God also disappears. The absolute is the universal unity of the world, which posits and sublates the individual as its modes. God is the being in all existence, the life in all that lives, the thought in all that think: he does not stand as an individual person beside and above other per- sons, but is the infinite which personifies itself and attains to consciousness in human spirits, and this from eternity ; before there was a humanity of earth there were spirits on other stars, in whom God reflected himself. Three decades later Strauss again created a sensation by his confession of materialism and atheism, The Old Faith and the New, 1872 (since the second edition, " With a