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Some Sources of Romanticism: 2 – The First Attack on Enlightenment

Isaiah Berlin

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The Highest Flight of Human Artistic Genius Consists in Visualizing the Universal Pattern

The dominant aesthetic theory of the erly eighteenth century was that man should hold up the mirror to nature. These people, i don't think, meant that by this particular phrase, by nature, they meant life. The highest flight of human artistic genius consisted in somehow visualizing that inner objective ideal towards which nature and man tended. And anybody who understands the pattern which nature follows is surely a rational entity otherwise man would not be able to conceive it or understand it at all. That is the argument.

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