Æsthetic Idealism


Besides pietism, the Germany of the end of the eighteenth century
possessed still another foil and counterpoise to its decadent
rationalism. This was the so-called æsthetic-idealistic movement, which
shades off into romanticism. The debt of Schleiermacher to that movement
has been already hinted at. It was the revolt of those who had this in
common with the pietists, that they hated and despised the outworn
rationalism. They thought they wanted no religion. It is open to us to
say that they misunderstood religion. It was this misunderstanding which
Schleiermacher sought to bring home to them. What religion they
understood, ecclesiasticism, Roman or Lutheran, or again, the banalities
and fanaticisms of middle-class pietism, they despised. Their war with
rationalism was not because it had deprived man of religion. It had been
equally destructive of another side of the life of feeling, the
æsthetic. Their war was not on behalf of the good, it was in the name of
the beautiful. Rationalism had starved the soul, it had minimised and
derided feeling. It had suppressed emotion. It had been fatal to art. It
was barren of poetry. It had had no sympathy with history and no
understanding of history. It had reduced everything to the process by
which two and two make four. The pietists said that the frenzy for
reason had made man oblivious of the element of the divine. The æsthetic
idealists said that it had been fatal to the element of the human. From
this point of view their movement has been called the new humanism. The
glamour of life was gone, they said. Mystery had vanished. And mystery
is the womb of every art. Rationalism had been absolutely uncreative,
only and always destructive. Rousseau had earlier uttered this wail in