Abstract
HISTORIES of German literature usually distinguish a Romantic School of writers whose activities began in the closing years of the eighteenth century and continued until the fourth decade of the nineteenth century. The more obvious characteristics of these authors consisted of a certain antagonism to classical antiquity and to rationalism. They preferred the medieval and the mystical. They glorified the German past, and they fostered German nationalism and State-idolatry, the bitter fruits of which the world is now tasting, and not for the first time. More or less intimately associated with the Romantic School were certain famous philosophers—the brothers Schlegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and the arch-totalitarian Fichte. In the circumstances it was to be expected that German Romanticism would not be lacking in world-views of some sort. To find any unity or harmony in these world-views would be rather difficult in any event ; and Mr. Gode-von Aesch has increased his difficulties by including in the German Romantic movement some writers, like Goethe, Herder and others, who are not usually regarded as belonging to it. Sometimes, indeed, he seems to wander away altogether from the historic Romantic School, and to discourse about a Romantic world of thought without specific reference to individual representatives. At times, in fact, the reader gets the impression that the author has put together in his volume a number of separate essays which are not sufficiently interconnected to constitute a systematic exposition of the theme designated in the title of his book.
Natural Science in German Romanticism
By Alexander Gode-von Aesch. Pp. xiii + 302. (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1941.) 20s. net.
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WOLF, A. Natural Science in German Romanticism. Nature 149, 104 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/149104a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/149104a0