The Men of the Anglo-French Enlightenment were empirical and utilitarian in outlook, and severed all the ties between God and man. But the German ( Enlightenment) ,while abandoning the old dogmas,exalted the idea of divine order,of a progressive education of the human race. It preserved and interpreted the christian notion of the relation between Creator and creatures. This trend continues in the historicism of German 19th-century thought. In history - the record of the works of man- man learns to study himself as an object;in this object each individual finds more than himself.
The German philosopher J.G.Herder ( 17744- 1803) was the first to show a true historical sense for the uniqueness of each people and their works. In ideas on the philosophy of the history of Mankind , he sees all races and all types of civilization as realizing each in their own way the human ideal- in contrast, for example, to Condorcet;s view of the progress of the human race as a whole through the development of knowledge and arts.
Hegel sees history of the world as the carrying out of God's plan, in which mankind is involved. The individual is confronted by the traditions of society into which he is born, finds his place and significance by absorbing these traditions and being absorbed by them. This is the positive concept of freedom. Here law morality,government are not constraints,but are the objective presence of the individual's own essence- Reason. He attains his spiritual reality by identifying himself with them,thus participating in the infinite whole. Truth is the unity of the universal and subjective will; and its universal and rational arrangements. The state is the divine idea as its exists on earth. In such a conjunction of the universal with the particularity lies the divinity of our nation;or,if we give this universal a separate place in our ideas, it is the god of the nation.
The romantic idea of the present with its romantic idea of the past was utterly opposed to individualism of the Enlightenment. It was a new transcendental interpretation of the absolute power and the will of the sovereign state which was assumed to express the general will of the fraternal and organic commonwealth.
Joseph Mazzini ( 1805-72) , the Italian patriot , expressed his religious view of history and politics differently. He, too , deplored the individualism and materialism which has grown from the enlightenment and the french revolution. Like the German philosophers, he accepted society as an organic whole, living a providentially progressive life, and realizing in its laws and educational plan. Like the French socialists ,he wanted to see the privilege abolished so that workers might enter into the full inheritance of modern society. But Mazzini saw society as a living body , held together by tradition,language and nationality. men should abandon the old principles of the concert of Europe with dynastic divisions based on power politics, and adopt a new ideal: the free and fraternal association of peoples. The people were to be called upon to sacrifice themselves, not to existing State,but to this divine idea and providential order, ' God and the people.
The prolonged revolutionary crisis which troubled Europe could be relived only by re-drawing the map on the bases of nationality and free association. The idea of humanity itself as a fraternal association of free nations was the divine idea, and the individual found the divine only in the nation, his link with humanity. Individualism , at best, meant disenchantment , the moral suffering and despair of negative romanticism. The positive ideal was the divine idea and the divine will at work in history.
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