Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III THE GERMANIC PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY The unity of the German people longed for and dreamed of after 1807 became an established fact through the war of 1870 with France. It is easy to assign symbolic significance to this fact. Ever since the time of the French Revolution—if not before—German thought has taken shape in conflict with ideas that were characteristically French and in sharp and conscious antithesis to them. Rousseau's deification of Nature was the occasion for the development of the conception of Culture. His condemnation of science and art as socially corrupting and socially divisive worked across the Rhine to produce the notion that science and art are the forces which moralize and unify humanity. The cosmopolitanism of the French Enlightenment was transformed by German thinkers into a self-conscious assertion of nationalism. The abstract Rights of Man of the French Revolution were set in antithesis to the principle of the rights of the citizen secured to him solely by the power of the politically organized nation. The deliberate breach of the revolutionary philosophy with the past, the attempt (foreshadowed in the philosophy of Descartes) to make a tabula rasa of the fortuitous assemblage of traditions and institutions which history offers, in order to substitute a social structure built upon Reason, was envisaged as the fans et origo of all evil. That history is itself incarnate reason; that history is infinitely more rational than the formal abstracting and generalizing reason of individuals; that individual mind becomes rational only through the absorption and assimilation of the universal reason embodied in historic institutions and historic development, became the articles of faith of the German intellectual creed. It is hardly an exaggeration to say th...