One may well say with Feuerbach and others that religion has displaced the human from man, and has transferred it so into another world that, unattainable, it went on with its own existence there as something personal in itself, as a "God": but the error of religion is by no means exhausted with this. One might very well let fall the personality of the displaced human, might transform God into the divine, and still remain religious. For the religious consists in discontent with the _present_ man, _i. e._ in the setting up of a "perfection" to be striven for, in "man wrestling for his completion."[174] ("Ye therefore _should_ be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect." Matt. 5. 48): it consists in the fixation of an _ideal_, an absolute. Perfection is the "supreme good," the _finis bonorum_; every one's ideal is the perfect man, the true, the free man, etc.
The efforts of modern times aim to set up the ideal of the "free man." If one could find it, there would be a new--religion, because a new ideal; there would be a new longing, a new torment, a new devotion, a new deity, a new contrition.
With the ideal of "absolute liberty," the same turmoil is made as with everything absolute, and according to Hess, _e. g._, it is said to "be realizable in absolute human society."[175] Nay, this realization is immediately afterward styled a "vocation"; just so he then defines liberty as "morality": the kingdom of "justice" (_i. e._ equality) and "morality" (_i. e._ liberty) is to begin, etc.
Ridiculous is he who, while fellows of his tribe, family, nation, etc., rank high, is--nothing but "puffed up" over the merit of his fellows; but blinded too is he who wants only to be "man." Neither of them puts his worth in _exclusiveness_, but in _connectedness_, or in the "tie" that conjoins him with others, in the ties of blood, of nationality, of humanity.
Through the "Nationals" of to-day the conflict has again been stirred up between those who think themselves to have merely human blood and human ties of blood, and the others who brag of their special blood and the special ties of blood.
If we disregard the fact that pride may mean conceit, and take it for consciousness alone, there is found to be a vast difference between pride in "belonging to" a nation and therefore being its property, and that in calling a nationality one's property. Nationality is my quality, but the nation my owner and mistress. If you have bodily strength, you can apply it at a suitable place and have a self-consciousness or pride of it; if, on the contrary, your strong body has you, then it pricks you everywhere, and at the most unsuitable place, to show its strength: you can give nobody your hand without squeezing his.