"When [the Hegelians] appeal to Hegel himself and protest that he would not have recognized my book* as an expression of his own feelings, I agree. Hegel was personally no friend of historical criticism. It annoyed him, as it annoyed Goethe, [to] see the heroic figures of antiquity, to which their higher feelings clung lovingly, gnawed at by critical doubt. If, occasionally, these figures were puffs of mist which they took to be pieces of rock, they did not want to know; they did not want to be disturbed in the illusion by which they felt exalted."
-- *In Defense of My 'Life of Jesus' against the Hegelians, 1838, David Friedrich Strauss, cited in The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche, George S. Williamson, 2004, p. 159.
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