CHAPTER III - LITERATURE AND THOUGHT: THE ROMANTIC TENDENCY, ROUSSEAU, KANT

Summary

In the twenty-five years which preceded the outbreak of the French Revolution, the intellectual condition of Europe was one of exceptional complexity. In some of the more backward countries, and also in some of the more backward social strata, old orthodoxies still held sway, such as the belief in the divine right of kings and in the providential character of universal history. Side by side with it there existed a new radicalism which has come to be known as the Enlightenment. It appealed above all to the intelligentsia and to the grande bourgeoisie, but made increasing inroads into the thinking of the other social classes. Its watchwords were: rationality, not tradition; happiness in this life, not salvation for the next. It was this movement, with its insistent demand for the revaluation of all social institutions, which prepared the great cataclysm of 1789. But the most interesting feature of this period is the presence within it of yet a third tendency which was both revolutionary and reactionary at the same time: revolutionary in relation to the old orthodoxies, reactionary in relation to the Enlightenment. The philosophy of the Enlightenment was essentially a rationalistic philosophy, that is to say, it regarded man as, in the first place, a rational animal, and, consistently with this, looked to abstract ratiocination for the answer to all human problems, great and small. But man is more than an animated calculating machine. The very one-sidedness of the philosophes was bound to evoke, sooner or later, a vigorous reaction which was to emphasise the non-rational elements in human nature, the power of sentiment and passion, the glory of the imaginative faculties, and the need to confront, and indeed to accept, the mysteries of existence which surround us on all sides.