 In notes for lectures on the history of modern philosophy that he delivered in 1835/36, Feuerbach wrote that idealism is the “one true philosophy”, and that “what is not spirit is nothing” (VGP 139). Around the same time he vigorously defended the “absolute method” employed by Hegel in his Logic against its critics (GW 8:73). Feuerbach himself referred to his early philosophical “standpoint” as “the standpoint of pantheistic identity” (GW 10:291). His efforts to extricate himself from this standpoint were ongoing over the course of two decades, though the extent to which they ultimately succeeded is debatable. Whereas the young Marx saw Feuerbach as “the true conqueror of the old philosophy”, the neo-Kantian historian of materialism, F.A. Lange, could find in his “new” philosophy only another iteration of the philosophy of spirit, “which we encounter here in the form of a philosophy of sensuousness” that lacks materialistic bona fides (Marx 1844: 80; Lange [1866] 1974: v. 2, 522).