Major reorientation of thinking took place near the beginning of the 19th century.  Was Romanticism a deliberate revolution against 18th century norms, or was it a direct product of changes already taking place in the neoclassicism of the previous period?  The orthodox 18th century was the age of reason, with a static conception of the universe.

Romantic poetry has an overabundance of organic metaphors which imply growth, change, connection.  It is difficult to formulate a coherent theory of the age because the age is laced with all sorts of curious inconsistencies or dramatic symptoms, i.e.,
 1. interest in nature (natural nature, wild nature) contrasted with
 2. interest in urban life (Blake & his preapocalyptic vision); and
 3. attitude toward imagination (antipathy to the dominance of reason) &
 4. attraction to the idea of reason (“Imagination is reason in her ultimate mood”—Wordsworth).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the major philosopher of the period.  Rousseau contends that “man…is born noble and good in a state of nature; he is entirely free in this simple, primitive state, free from the ravages of inequality and servitude.  Man close to the primitive beauties of nature is at his healthiest and most virtuous; this oneness with the beauties that surround him provides a deep spirituality and a knowledge transcending the merely factual.  Only the development of societal structures and the entrapment of men and women therein breed competition, selfishness, inequality, and corruption.  An artificial educational system generates hypocrisy, vanity, and, finally, the worst kind of ignorance.  Ultimately a government of force supports the new structures, a government not rooted in the consent of the people.  This government must be overthrown, and, since the Edenic state of nature can never be recaptured, some form of republic must emerge, a democracy which allows for the full development of the natural man, for his participation in the shaping of his destiny, for the possibility of nourishing himself close to nature and of expressing his deepest feelings.”

 Immanuel Kant held that all human knowledge is subjective in character.  Objects can be known only by their qualities: hardness, squareness, color, etc.  These qualities are not inherent in the things themselves but are expressions of human reactions to them.  Hence, the function of the intellect is to sift, coordinate, and arrange these sense impressions into a meaningful pattern.  It is the human intellect, therefore, that imposes and, in a sense, creates the  order of the cosmos.  Kant drew attention to the human power known as the Will which manifests itself in a constant striving toward the verities of the spiritual or moral world which are unrelated to sense impressions and are consequently unknowable to the intellect.  Whereas the intellect draws impressions of the outward world to itself, the will reaches outward to an external reality with a certainty that it exists.  This is the reality of a universal moral law, of a sense of absolute goodness which can exist only in the will, being incapable of demonstration by reason.