My purpose in the present volume, as its subtitle indicates, is to examine certain aspects of the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century as it expressed itself in the philosophical and religious thought of the period. Although romanticism's most celebrated achievements were in literature and the arts – especially music – that side of it which I shall be concerned with is of more than marginal significance, since its most representative figures all favoured a religious interpretation of the cosmos, or at any rate such a spiritual view of life and the world as to leave room for the preservation of religious attitudes, though the forms of Christian orthodoxy might have to be radically modified or even abandoned. Thus the word ‘God’ could be used symbolically for the Absolute, or the World Soul, or the Power of Nature, or Providence, or perhaps only a scarcely articulate ‘sense of something still more deeply interfused’. Romanticism differed fundamentally therefore in outlook and aim from the sceptical and rationalist doctrines of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In philosophy this reaction took shape in the great idealist metaphysical systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel and the theology and religious philosophy of Schleiermacher, all of whom opposed the abstractions of Newtonian ‘reason’ with a new appeal to experience – the apprehension and appreciation of life in all its range and variety, its accomplishment and promise. And the centre of such experience was of course man himself.