find a higher life. And, as a necessary consequence, religion gave way
to naturalism and poetry to prose.

After this age of prose came our own day. The new light first flushed
the modern world in the writings of the philosopher-poets of Germany:
Kant and Lessing, Fichte and Schiller, Goethe and Hegel. They brought
about the Copernican change. For them this world of the five senses, of
space and time and natural cause, instead of being the fixed centre
around which all things revolved, was explicable only in its relation to
a system which was spiritual; and man found his meaning in his
connection with society, the life of which stretched endlessly far back
into the past and forward into the future. Psychology gave way to
metaphysics. The universal element in the thought of man was revealed.
Instead of mechanism there was life. A new spirit of poetry and
philosophy brought God back into the world, revealed his incarnation in
the mind of man, and changed nature into a pellucid garment within which
throbbed the love divine. The antagonism of hard alternatives was at an
end; the universe was spirit-woven and every smallest object was "filled
full of magical music, as they freight a star with light." There were no
longer two worlds, but one; for "the other" world penetrated this, and
was revealed in it: thought and sense, spirit and nature, were
reconciled. These thinkers made room for man, as against the Puritans,
and for God, as against their successors. Instead of the hopeless
struggle of ascetic morality, which divides man against himself, they
awakened him to that sense of his reconciliation with his ideal which
religion gives: "Psyche drinks its stream and forgets her sorrows."

Now, this is just the soil where art blooms. For what is beauty but the
harmony of thought and sense, a universal meaning caught and tamed in
the particular? To the poet each little flower that blooms has endless