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peculiar fashion and incorporates those aspirations which circum–
stances and its own individual nature have generated, and is not,
therefore, to be judged by the patterns and goals of other organisms.
This cut athwart the dominant
philosophia perennis,
the belief in the
generality, uniformity, universality, timeless validity of objective and
eternal laws and rules that apply everywhere, at all times, to all men
and things, the secular or naturalistic version of which was advocated
by the leaders of the French Enlightenment, inspired by the triumph of
the natural and mathematical sciences, in terms of which German
culture, religious, literary, inward-looking, liable to mysticism, nar–
rowly provincial, at best feebly imitative of the west, made such a poor
showing.
I do not wish
to
imply that this crucial contrast was, at any rate at
first, more than a vision in the heads of a small group of German poets
and critics. But it was these writers who, in all probability, felt most
acutely displaced by the social transformation through which Ger–
many, and in particular Prussia, was passing under the westernising
reforms of Frederick the Great. Barred from all real power, unable
to
fit
themselves into the bureaucratic organisation which was imposed on
traditional ways of life, acutely sensitive
to
the incompatibility of their
basically Christian, Protestant, moralistic outlook with the scientific
temper of the French Enlightenment, harried by the petty despotism of
two hundred princes, the most gifted and independent among them
responded
to
the undermining of their world, which had begun with
the humiliations inflicted upon their grandfathers by the armies of
Louis XIV, by a growing revolt. They contrasted the depth and poetry
of the German tradition, with its capacity for fitful but authentic
insights into the inexhaustible, inexpressible variety of the life of the
spirit, with the shallow materialism, the utilitarianism, and the thin,
dehumanised shadow play of the worlds of the French thinkers. This
outlook is one of the wellsprings of the romantic movement, which in
Germany, at any rate, celebrated the collective will, untrammelled by
rules which men could discover by rational methods, the spiritual life
of the people in whose activity-or impersonal will-creative individu–
als could participate, but which they could not observe or describe. The
conception of the political life of the nation as the expression of this
collective will is the essence of political romanticism-that is, nation–
alism.
Let me repeat once again that even though nationalism seems to
me in the first place to be a response to a wound inflicted upon a
society, this, although it is a necessary, is not a sufficient cause of
