poets and idealists from Rousseau to Wordsworth discovered in a life
"according to nature" the ideal for man; sociologists from Hume to
Bentham, and from Burke to Coleridge, applied to human society
conceptions derived from physics or from biology, and emphasised all
that connects it with the mechanical aggregate of atoms, or with the
organism.

In another aspect it was a return to God. If the scientific movement
tended to subjugate man to a Nature in which, as Laplace said, there was
no occasion for God, Wordsworth saw both in Nature and in man a spirit
"deeply interfused"; and the great contemporary school of German
philosophy set all ethical thinking in a new perspective by its original
handling of the old thesis that duty is a realisation of the will of
God.

But, in yet another aspect, it was a return to Man. If Man was brought
nearer to Nature and to God, it was to a Nature and to a God which had
themselves acquired, for him, closer affinities with humanity. He
divined, with Wordsworth, his own joy, with Shelley his own love, in the
breathing flower; he saw with Hegel in the Absolute Spirit a power
vitally present in all man's secular activities and pursuits. And these
interpreting voices of poets and philosophers were but the signs of less
articulate sensibilities far more widely diffused, which were in effect
bringing about a manifold expansion and enrichment of normal, mental,
and emotional life. Scott made the romantic past, Byron and Goethe, in
their different ways, the Hellenic past, a living element of the
present; and Fichte, calling upon his countrymen to emancipate
themselves, in the name not of the "rights of men" but of the genius of
the German people, uttered the first poignant recognition of national
life as a glorious vesture arraying the naked body of the individual