Well, the story of the romantic school is the story of the enlargement of Fichte’s onesidedness through the appearance, in the first place, of other not less arbitrary doctrines, which sought to interpret the whole world in terms of our spiritual interests, but which expressed other interests than those that he made central. And, for the rest, this story is also the tale of the gradual fixing of all such waywardness into the directions that have proved so fruitful in the recent decades of modern research. We are too frequently disposed to fancy that the philosophy of the period of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel is something very remote from the philosophy of our own day. That philosophy, we say, was above all just wayward, fantastic, regardless of the limits of human knowledge, indifferent to science, unwisely imaginative. Nowadays we have changed all that, have abandoned romantic wanderings, have come to respect the facts of science, and to let the mysteries alone. But such a view of our relations to the age of the romantic school is not precisely historical; and wherein it is not precisely historical I want to make plain to you. Deeper than the contrast between that age and ours is, as we shall soon see, the relationship between the two. Our age, as we shall learn, contains merely what was implicit in the very waywardness of that revolutionary period. Their youthful enthusiasms, at first vague, wandering, conflicting, took form at length through growth, and produced, in their maturity, our modern doctrine of evolution, our modern efforts to bring into close relation the natural and the spiritual, our whole modern many-sidedness of interest and experience. The romantic period was the time of bloom and of flowers. Our period, if you will, is, in its matter-of-fact and apparently prosaic realism, the time of the ripened seeds, a time which the warm-hearted usually scorn as a bleak and autumnal period of dry seed-pods and chilly night airs. But the wise love such ages of ripening and of harvest; for they know
