 In 1839, the same year that Feuerbach made his first public break with Hegelianism in the essay, “Toward a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy”, he was still able to write that he missed in speculative philosophy “the element of the empirical, and in empiricism the element of speculation”, and to describe his own method as an effort to conjoin both kinds of philosophical “activity” into a form of “skepticism or critique just as much of the merely speculative as of the merely empirical” (GW 9:12). It was only in 1842, between the time of the publication of the first (1841) and second (1843) editions of The Essence of Christianity (which happens also to have been a time of draconian censorship and police surveillance) that Feuerbach became convinced of the need to make a “radical break” with the speculative philosophical  tradition.[13]  This prompted him to report in the preface to the second edition of his famous book that “the Idea” retained for him only a practical significance as “faith in the historical future”, and in the triumph of truth and virtue. In the realm of theoretical philosophy proper he now considered himself, “in complete opposition to the Hegelian philosophy”, a realist and a materialist (WC 15). 