To be a man in nature and to fight one’s way to liberty is a much more dignified position than to go lobbying to the courts of the celestials and to beg of them favors. Progress does not pursue a straight line, but moves in spirals or epicycles. Periods of daylight are followed by nights of superstition. So it happened that in the first and second decades of the nineteenth century the rationalism of the eighteenth century waned, not to make room for a higher rationalism, but to suffer the old bugbears of ghosts and hobgoblins to reappear in a reactionary movement. Faust (expressing here Goethe’s own ideas) continues:
“Now fills the air so many a haunting shape,
That no one knows how best he may escape.
What though the day with rational splendor beams,
The night entangles us in webs of dreams.
By superstition constantly ensnared,
It spooks, gives warnings, is declared.
Intimidated thus we stand alone.
The portal jars, yet entrance is there none.”
{xv}