"...the metaphysical thrill was a genuine and frequent experience of unbelievers in Germany long before the Romantics. As to the philosophers, Heine was not far wrong when he wrote in Die Romantische Schule that German philosophy, though it now claimed a place by the side of the Protestant Church, or even above it, was nevertheless only its daughter, and literary men too, sometimes unconsciously, were concerned to answer just those questions about life which their childhood religion had made all important for them, but which today, for many English philosophers at least, seem to be literally without meaning, so much do our intellectual interests depend on the intellectual climate we are in."
-- Culture and Society in Classical Weimar 1775-1806, W. H. Bruford, 1962, p. 28.
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