No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no resonance for us, as it once had for the Germans in the 1820s and the British and Americans around the 1880s.

The idea of romanticising the world goes back to the idea of creating a harmonious whole where the individual will feel at one with himself, others and nature.

That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy.

The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state.

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.

Schiller never wanted to replace the moral with the aesthetic but he did want the moral to be one part of the aesthetic. He rightly notes the aesthetic dimension of morality, that we use concepts like grace to characterise people who do their duty with ease and pleasure.

There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason.