Marie and Antoine Lavoisier (credit: J. L. David, via Wikipedia)

This scientific way of thinking was used by geniuses like Newton, Harvey, Faraday, Lavoisier, and others. They piled up successes in the hard market of practical results. Of those who resisted the new way, some went down in military defeats, some were converted by reason, some worked out compromises, and some simply got old and died, still resisting the new ways and still preaching the old ones to smaller and smaller audiences.

The Enlightenment, as it is now called, had taken over.

Other societies that operated under world views in which humans were thought to have little ability to control the events of life are to be found in all countries and all eras of history, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that the advancing worldview by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, everywhere on this planet, was the one we call scientific, also called the Enlightenment view. Human minds can solve anything, they believed. Reason will keep producing new waves of progress. A Golden Age is coming.

The one significant interruption in the spread of the Enlightenment’s values is the period called the Romantic Age. The meaning of this time is still being debated. I see it as a period of adjustment, of finding a new balance. In the cultural evolution of our species, values and ways of life keep evolving into more vigorous versions of human society all the time. The Romantic Age was a period of finding a new balance between values that freed individuals and values that created stability in communities. But, there are a couple of especially interesting points to note about the Romantic Age (mid-1700s to the mid-1800s).

                     

                            

                          

               Art in the Romantic Age (credit: Caspar David Friedrich, via Wikimedia Commons)

First, Romanticism affirmed and expanded the value of the individual when the Enlightenment had gone too far. Some prominent Enlightenment thinkers (Kant especially) had made duty—to one’s family, city , or state—seem like the prime value, the one that should motivate all humans as they chose their actions. Romanticism asserted passionately that the individual had a greater duty to her/his own soul. I have dreams, ideas, and feelings that are uniquely mine, and I have a right to them.

Note also that, paradoxically, this philosophy of individualism can be very useful for a whole society when it is spread over millions of citizens and multiple generations. This is because even though most dreamers create little that is of practical use to the larger community, and some even become criminals, a few create brilliant things that pay huge material, political, and artistic dividends. (Steam engines, vaccines, universal suffrage, Impressionism, etc.)

                         

   

                        Drawing of guillotining during the French Revolution (credit: Wikipedia)

In the second place, however, we should note that as a political philosophy, Romanticism produced painful excesses. In France, for example, the citizens were indeed passionate about their ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, but once they had overthrown the hereditary kings and nobles and set up their people’s republic, they didn’t know how to administer a large, populous state. In a short while, they fell into disorder and internal wrangling. Then, as their new state began to unravel, they simply traded one autocrat for another (Louis XVI for Napoleon). Their struggle to understand how a system of government that truly harmonized with the best of human nature could be created took longer than one generation to evolve.

But the French did begin evolving resolutely toward it. After Napoleon’s fall, a new Bourbon dynasty got control, but the powers of the monarchs were now much more limited, and after more turmoil, the Bourbon gang was ousted altogether. Democracy evolved – in erratic ways and by pain, but it evolved and grew strong, and is still evolving in France, as is the case in all modern states.