 As Rawidowicz (1964: 113) and Ascheri (1964: 62) have both observed, the break with the speculative tradition that Feuerbach signaled in the “Preliminary Theses” and in Principles corresponds to a notable change in his stance toward religion, if not in his estimation of the truth-value of traditional doctrinal claims. In his polemical essays of the late 1830s, and in The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach had unfavorably contrasted the “egoistic”, practical standpoint of religion, which he associated with the unrestricted subjectivity of feeling (Gemüt) and imagination (Phantasie), with the impartial, theoretical standpoint of philosophy, which he associated with reason and objectivity. At the end of Principles, however, he informs his readers that the new philosophy, without ceasing to be theoretical, nevertheless has a fundamentally practical tendency, and that in this respect it “assumes the place of religion” and “is in truth itself religion” (GPZ 341/73). This line of thought is developed somewhat further in an unpublished manuscript where Feuerbach observes that, in order to replace religion, philosophy must itself become religion in the sense that “it must, in a way suited to its own nature, incorporate the essence of religion or the advantage that religion possesses over philosophy” (NV 123/148). Here Feuerbach does not tell his readers what this advantage is, but in the Lectures he claims that the difference between philosophy and religion can be reduced to “the simple statement that religion is sensuous and aesthetic, while philosophy is nonsensuous and abstract” (VWR 20/13). Religion’s “advantage” over the old philosophy, then, is presumably it’s implicit acknowledgment of the “truth and essentiality of sensuousness” and of human finitude, which it is the task of the new philosophy to articulate explicitly.