 Although, in the “Theses”, Feuerbach refers to “speculative philosophy” as having been inaugurated by Spinoza, restored by Schelling, and perfected by Hegel (VT 243), in Principles he locates the origin of this tradition in the Cartesian philosophy, and specifically in “the abstraction from the sensuous [Sinnlichkeit], from matter” (GPZ 275/ 13) through which the conception of the cogito first arose. Much of the content of Principles consists of a truncated survey of the history of modern philosophy, which purports to trace through a number of dialectical inversions a necessary development from the rationalistic theism of Descartes and Leibniz through the pantheism of Spinoza to the idealism of Kant and Fichte, culminating in Hegel’s philosophy of identity. What this survey is primarily intended to show is that the fundamental tendency of this development has been toward the actualization and humanization of God or, alternatively, toward 