A Romantic Nature
Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her… and powerless to penetrate beyond her... Each of her works has an essence of its own; each of her phenomena a special characterisation: and yet their diversity is in unity.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Theobald von Oer, Der Weimarer Musenhof (1860).
Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
An intellectual movement that swept across Europe beginning in the late 1700s, Romanticism profoundly influenced Western society's views about nature and the place of humans within it. The origins of this movement can be traced back to the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he wrote that the laws of nature only existed because the human mind interpreted them, introducing a transcendentalist view in which the natural world is a subjective experience. Kant's reasoning gave rise to what Romantic poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge regarded as the aesthetic unity of all nature, of which humans were considered to be a part. It also inspired the notion that only through artistic expression and emotion could the natural world be truly understood, forming an enduring bridge between science and art.