 Feuerbach achieved the height of his brief literary fame with the publication in 1841 of The Essence of Christianity, which was translated into English by the novelist, Mary Anne Evans (a.k.a. George Eliot), who also translated Strauss’s Life of Jesus. Engels recalled the appearance of Feuerbach’s book as having a profoundly “liberating effect” on him and Marx by “breaking the spell” of the Hegelian system, and establishing the truths that human consciousness is the only consciousness or spirit that exists, and that it is dependent upon the physical existence of human beings as part of nature (Engels 1888: 12–13). In 1844 Marx wrote to Feuerbach, with reference to the latter’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843; hereafter Principles) and The Essence of Faith According to Luther (1844), that in them he had, intentionally or not, “given socialism a philosophical foundation” (GW v. 18, p. 376). In fact, Feuerbach was only then beginning to acquaint himself with socialist ideas through his reading of authors like Lorenz von Stein and Wilhelm Weitling. In the end he declined Marx’s request for a contribution to the German-French Annals, as well as Ruge’s urging that he become more politically engaged. He did come out of rural seclusion to observe fairly passively the ultimately disappointing events in Frankfurt in 1848, and to deliver a series of public lectures at Heidelberg beginning the same year. He unfortunately failed to develop with much specificity or argumentative rigor the “philosophy of the future” for which he himself called in the early 1840s, continuing instead to focus his attention mainly on religion in works like The Essence of Religion (1845), Lectures on the Essence of Religion (1851), and Theogony According to the Sources of Classical, Hebrew and Christian Antiquity (1857). The five years of philological labor that Feuerbach invested in the latter work, which he considered his crowning achievement, went largely unnoticed both by his contemporaries and by posterity.