Ludwig Feuerbach: Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830)
[1F-TDI: p. 14-15]
[p. 14] “Once all that is truly actual, universal, substantial, once all Spirit, soul, and essence have disappeared from real life, nature, and world history, once everything has been massacred, has been dissolved into its parts, … then upon the ruins of the broken world , the individual raises [p. 15] the banner of the prophet and stations the abominable sacred watchman of the belief in his immortality and in the pledge of the hereafter. (…) After he has allowed to wither the fruit trees, the roses and lilies of the present world … and has transformed the whole world into a desiccated field of stubble, there finally springs up, in the empty feeling of his futility and the impotent consciousness of his vanity, as the weak semblance and faint illusion of the living, fresh time when flowers bloom, the nondescript, pale red, faded autumn crocus of immortality.” [1F-TDI: p. 14-15]
[2F-TDI: p. 51]
“… transitoriness is the essence of all feeling.” [2F-TDI: p. 51]
[3F-TDI: p. 62]
“… it is absolutely certain that, in all of creation, there exists but one animated and ensouled point, and that this point is the earth, which is the soul and purpose of the great cosmos. (…) … the body is the background of the soul; it is … the prehistory of the soul; … it is the precondition … of the soul; the would cannot exist without a body. (…) … the soul, as the purpose of the body, is the body’s inward, concealed spiritual cause.” [3F-TDI: p. 62]
[4F-TDI: p. 65]
“Where nature … recollects and concentrates itself, and expresses its power in the form of power and intensiveness, not in and as quantity, it becomes quality, kind, animation, earth.” [4F-TDI: p. 65]
[5F-TDI: p. 69]
“You are perfect on in the contemplation of the totality, only in thinking, only in the delightful knowledge of the perfect. As a mortal, single individual, you will share in no other perfection.” [5F-TDI: p. 69]
[6F-TDI: p. 72]
“Thinking arises only at the conclusion, … only at the end of all nature …; nature has arrived at its outer boundary in thinking: there it ceases.” [6F-TDI: p. 72]
[7F-TDI: p. 72]
“Since we presently do think here on earth and since earthly nature already has run through an infinitely great series of stages and kinds of sensible existence and life, of air, earth, stones, up to
