For the moment it was Hindu indolence, the contemplative life, the plant life, that was the ideal. It is this ideal which is extolled in Schlegel's _Lucinde_ and which somewhat later is appropriated by the French Romanticists, re-appearing with variations in Théophile Gautier's _Fortunio_. We trace it in Oehlenschläger's inspired idler, Aladdin, and it is the ideal always present to the mind of the æsthete in _Enten-Eller_, who, like Kierkegaard himself, was brought up on the German Romanticists. Note his words: "I divide my time thus: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. When I sleep I never dream, for to sleep is the highest achievement of genius." Goethe, as an old man, sought refuge in the East from the turmoil of the day, and wrote his _West-östlicher Divan_. The Romanticists did but follow in his track. Presently, however, their doctrines were placed on a philosophical basis by Schelling, who had been alarmed and converted by the religious and political aberrations of the French. As Goethe had sought refuge in far-off Asia, Schelling sought refuge from discordant surroundings in the far-off past, and discovered there the sources of life and truth. In contradiction to the belief of the "enlightenment" period that humanity had laboriously raised itself from barbarism to culture, from instinct to reason, he maintained that it had fallen--fallen, that is to say, from a higher state in which its education had been superintended by higher beings, spiritual powers. There was a fall; and in the degenerate times following upon that fall, there appeared but few of those teachers, those higher beings, prophets, geniuses of the Schelling type, who strove to lead men back to the old, perfect life. We of to-day know that science has justified the pre-Revolutionists and proved Schelling wrong; we, who live in the age of Charles Darwin, no longer accept the possibility of an original state of perfection and a fall. There is no doubt that the teaching of Darwin means the downfall of orthodox ethics, exactly as the teaching of Copernicus meant the downfall of orthodox dogma. The system of Copernicus deprived the heaven of the Church of its "local habitation"; the Darwinian system will despoil the Church of its Paradisaic Eden. But in those days this was not recognised, and Schelling directed men back to that primeval world whose myths of gods and demigods were to him historical facts; he ended by extolling mythology as the greatest of all works of art, one which was capable of infinite interpretation; and infinite in this context means arbitrary. We have here the germ of Grundtvig's myth-interpretation--with its unscientific and untrustworthy presentment of Scandinavian mythology.