German Romanticism: The Power of the Will

Philosophy in eighteenth-century France was dominated by the spirit of the Enlightenment which extolled neo-classicism, science and univer-salism. The result was an extreme form of rationalism in which the power of the intellect was, as the ancient Greeks maintained, supreme. Human beings are thinking, rational animals, or as Descartes put it, cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I exist). We exist as human beings because of the power of our thinking and it is through thinking according to the laws of deductive logic (for the mathematical sciences) and inductive logic (for the natural sciences) that we have progressed as a species. Never were science and the power of the intellect held in such high esteem as in the second half of the eighteenth century.