His literary influence, as the prophet of nature and feeling, and the champion of sentimental {237} religion against the _Philosophes_, carried everything before it. He struck into the path which had been opened in Germany by the translation of Thomson’s _Seasons_ before 1750, and followed by the Swiss critics and the idyllic poets, who were opponents of the dominant pseudo-classicism. [1] Jacobi, who passed some years of his youth at Geneva, owed his doctrine of feeling as the faculty of religious truth in part at least to Rousseau. Klinger, whose drama, _Sturm und Drang_, gave its name to the romantic and naturalist revolution, marked by Goethe’s _Götz von Berlichingen_ (1773) and Schiller’s _Räuber_ (1781), was responsible, we are told, in later years, for the surprising judgment that Rousseau (in _Emile_) is the young man’s best guide through life. [2] Even Schiller and Herder passed through a period of enthusiastic admiration for Rousseau. It is exceedingly significant that Schiller’s _Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humanity_ are addressed expressly to the problem of reconciling the claims of Nature [3] and of the State upon individual man. For, when Schiller suggests that the clue to the required reconciliation between Nature and the State lies in the union of feeling and intelligence which is found in Beauty, we have before us in a single focus three main types of experience, from the fusion of which a new idealism was to emerge. [1] See author’s _History of Aesthetic_, p. 214. [2] Lévy-Bruhl, _Loc. cit_. p. 330. The citation appears to be from a romance, and I have not seen the context. [3] Letter 3 contains a profound criticism of the supposed actual “state of nature,” and it might be said with truth that the whole subject of the letters is the problem “how man is to be free without ceasing to be sensuous.”