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 France, and had greatly influenced certain minds in Germany. Shelley and Keats were saying something of the sort in England. Even as to Wordsworth, it may be an open question if his religion was not mainly romanticism. All these men used language which had been conventionally associated with religion, to describe this other emotion.
Rationalism had ended in proving deadly to ideals. This was true. But men forgot for the moment how glorious an ideal it had once been to be rational and to assert the rationality of the universe. Still the time had come when, in Germany at all events, the great cry was, 'back to the ideal.' It is curious that men always cry 'back' when they mean 'forward.' For it was not the old idealism, either religious or æsthetic, which they were seeking. It was a new one in which the sober fruits of rationalism should find place. Still, for the moment, as we have seen, the air was full of the cry, 'back to the State by divine right, back to the Church, back to the Middle Age, back to the beauty of classical antiquity.' The poetry, the romance, the artistic criticism of this movement set themselves free at a stroke from theological bondage and from the externality of conventional ethics. It shook off the dust of the doctrinaires. It ridiculed the petty utilitarianism which had been the vogue. It had such an horizon as men had never dreamed before. It owed that horizon to the rationalism it despised. From its new elevation it surveyed all the great elements of the life of man. It saw morals and religion, language and society, along with art and itself, as the free and unconscious product through the ages, of the vitality of the human spirit. It must be said that it neither solved nor put away the ancient questions. Especially through its one-sided æstheticism it veiled that element of dualism in the world which Kant clearly saw, and we now see again, after a century which has sometimes leaned to easy pantheism. However, it led to a study of the human soul and of all its activities, which came closer to living nature than anything which the world had yet seen.
To this group of æsthetic idealists belong, not to mention lesser names, Lessing and Hamann and Winckelmann, but above all Herder and Goethe. Herder was surely the finest spirit among the elder contemporaries of Goethe. Bitterly hostile to the rationalists, he had been moved by Rousseau to enthusiasm for the free creative life of the human spirit. With Lessing he felt the worth of every art in and for itself, and the greatness of life in its own fulfilment. He sets out from the analysis of the poetic and artistic powers, the appreciation of which seemed to him to be the key to the understanding of the spiritual world. Then first he approaches the analysis of the ethical and religious feeling. All the knowledge and insight thus gained he gathers together into a history of the spiritual life of mankind. This life of the human spirit comes forth everywhere from nature, is bound to nature. It constitutes one whole with a nature which the devout soul calls God, and apprehends within itself as the secret of all that it is and does. Even in the period in which he had become passionately Christian, Herder never was able to attain to a scientific establishing of his Christianity, or to any sense of the specific aim of its development. He felt himself to be separated from Kant by an impassable gulf. All the sharp antinomies among which Kant moved, contrasts of that which is sensuous with that which is reasonable, of experience with pure conception, of substance and form in thought, of nature and freedom, of inclination and duty, seemed to Herder grossly exaggerated, if not absolutely false. Sometimes Herder speaks as if the end of life were simply the happiness which a man gets out of the use of all his powers and out of the mere fact of existence. Deeper is Kant's contention, that the true aim of life can be only moral culture, even independent of happiness, or rather one must find his noblest happiness in that moral culture.
At a period in his life when Herder had undergone conversion to court orthodoxy at Bückeburg and threatened to throw away that for which his life had stood, he was greatly helped by Goethe. The identification of Herder with Christianity continued to be more deep and direct than that of Goethe ever became, yet Goethe has also his measure of significance for our theme. If he steadied Herder in his religious experience, he steadied others in their poetical emotionalism and artistic sentimentality, which were fast becoming vices of the time. The classic repose of his spirit, his apparently unconscious illustration of the ancient maxim, 'nothing too much,' was the more remarkable, because there were few influences in the whole gamut of human life to which he did not sooner or later surrender himself, few experiences which he did not seek, few areas of thought upon which he did not enter. Systems and theories were never much to his mind. A fact, even if it were inexplicable, interested him much more. To the evolution of formal thought in his age he held himself receptive rather than directing. He kept, to the last, his own manner of brooding and creating, within the limits of a poetic impressionableness which instinctively viewed the material world and the life of the soul in substantially similar fashion. There is something almost humorous in the way in which he eagerly appropriated the results of the philosophising of his time, in so far as he could use these to sustain his own positions, and caustically rejected those which he could not thus use. He soon got by heart the negative lessons of Voltaire and found, to use the words which he puts into the mouth of Faust, that while it freed him from his superstitions, at the same time it made the world empty and dismal beyond endurance. In the mechanical philosophy which presented itself in the Système de la Nature as a positive substitute for his lost faith, he found only that which filled his poet's soul with horror. 'It appeared to us,' he says, 'so grey, so cimmerian and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost. We thought it the very quintessence of old age. All was said to be necessary, and therefore there was no God. Why not a necessity for a God to take its place among the other necessities!' On the other hand, the ordinary teleological theology, with its external architect of the world and its externally determined designs, could not seem to Goethe more satisfactory than the mechanical philosophy. He joined for a time in Rousseau's cry for the return to nature. But Goethe was far too well balanced not to perceive that such a cry may be the expression of a very artificial and sophisticated state of mind. It begins indeed in the desire to throw off that which is really oppressive. It ends in a fretful and reckless revolt against the most necessary conditions of human life. Goethe lived long enough to see in France that dissolution of all authority, whether of State or Church, for which Rousseau had pined. He saw it result in the return of a portion of mankind to what we now believe to have been their primitive state, a state in which they were 'red in tooth and claw.' It was not that paradisaic state of love and innocence, which, curiously enough, both Rousseau and the theologians seem to have imagined was the primitive state.
The thought of the discipline and renunciation of our lower nature in order to the realisation of a higher nature of mankind is written upon the very face of the second part of Faust. Certain passages in Dichtung and Wahrheit are even more familiar. 'Our physical as well as our social life, morality, custom, knowledge of the world, philosophy, religion, even many an accidental occurrence in our daily life, all tell us that we must renounce.' 'Renunciation, once for all, in view of the eternal,' that was the lesson which he said made him feel an atmosphere of peace breathed upon him. He perceived the supreme moral prominence of certain Christian ideas, especially that of the atonement as he interpreted it. 'It is altogether strange to me,' he writes to Jacobi, 'that I, an old heathen, should see the cross planted in my own garden, and hear Christ's blood preached without its offending me.'
Goethe's quarrel with Christianity was due to two causes. In the first place, it was due to his viewing Christianity as mainly, if not exclusively, a religion of the other world, as it has been called, a religion whose God is not the principle of all life and nature and for which nature and life are not divine. In the second place, it was due to the prominence of the negative or ascetic element in Christianity as commonly presented, to the fact that in that presentation the law of self-sacrifice bore no relation to the law of self-realisation. In both of these respects he would have found himself much more at home with the apprehension of Christianity which we have inherited from the nineteenth century. The programme of charity which he outlines in the Wanderjahre as a substitute for religion would be taken to-day, so far as it goes, as a rather moderate expression of the very spirit of the Christian religion.