Chivalry was in itself the poetry of life; what wonder then that that life of imagination, should have opened a new fountain of poesy in the traditional songs, the fairy lays, the varied minstrelsy, and knightly narratives of Germany and France, Spain and England, since in these countries, chivalry was the ruling element of society, and had made the greatest progress?--For the more immediate object of this Philosophy of History,--and in order to contemplate the progress of mankind in matters more serious and important, I have thought the moral principles of men in the middle age, and their political doctrines, as they were founded on religion, or on the system of opposition to religion, to be of far greater moment and importance than the mere æsthetic part of those ages; for sentimentalists may indulge in a certain vague, superficial love and predilection for the times of chivalry, for the romantic spirit of the chivalrous life, and of the chivalrous poetry, and of the whole system of modern art which has thence emanated; and nevertheless all the deeper problems of life involved in that momentous epoch may remain unexamined, unsolved, or even misunderstood. On the nature of this romantic tendency, inasmuch as it exerted a mighty influence on life, and was a motive of vast and undoubted weight in many of the most important historical events of those ages, I shall merely say a word by way of psychological illustration; for this is applicable to the prevailing forms of mind, the peculiar intellectual bearings of whole nations and ages, as to those of individuals. As where opinion is the ruling principle of life--it is very soon broken, divided, parcelled out and lost in a chaos of heterogeneous theories, and the age--the world--life itself are involved in interminable disputes; so when religious feeling constitutes the primary principle of life; and it hath been dismembered, and torn from its right centre, been driven to some extreme; and opinions flowing from this source have been carried into action; then all the great transactions of public life exhibit that overruling influence of imagination, perceptible not in the earlier, but in the later periods of the middle age, especially from the great epoch of the Crusades. Although these and other like great historical events of that period bear many noble traces of the high religious source whence they sprang; yet such a paramount influence of imagination over real life, must in this partial excess be regarded as the consequence of the dismemberment of man's psychological powers--a symptom of the dissolution of that internal harmony which can never subsist in society, unless it be previously established in consciousness. The radical vice of the middle age--that is to say, the one most prevalent in its later period from the time of the Ghibellines--if one may venture to characterize it with such psychological generality--is discernible in the productions of the poetry, art and science of that age.