[Footnote 10: Hegel, Werke, i. 166.] PROLEGOMENA BOOK II _IN THE PORCHES OF PHILOSOPHY_ CHAPTER XV. THE TWO AGES OF REASON. The eighteenth century--it has been often said--was a rationalising, unhistorical, age: and, in contrast, the nineteenth has been declared to be _par excellence_ the founder and the patron of the historical method. In the one, the tendency governing the main movement of European civilisation was towards cosmopolitan and universal enlightenment. A common ideal, and, because common, necessarily rather general and abstract, perhaps even somewhat vulgarly utilitarian, pervaded Western Europe, and threw its influence for good and evil on literature and art, on religion and polity. It grew out of a revulsion, in many ways natural, from the religious extravagances of the century-and-a-half preceding, which had led prudent thinkers to reduce religion to a 'reasonable' minimum, and to reject all things that savoured of or suggested enthusiasm, fanaticism, and superstition. In politics the same one type or system of government and laws was aimed at, more or less, in all advancing states. National peculiarities and patriotism were looked at askance, as unworthy of the free 'humanity' which was set forward as the end of all training. To simplify, to level, to render intelligible, and self-consistent was the task of enlightenment in dealing with all institutions. To remove all anomalies and inequalities, to give security for liberty and to facilitate the right to pursue happiness[1], was the chief watchword of this movement. Its questions were--Is religion, Is art and science, Is political organisation, a source of happiness? Are poetry, and a belief in divine things, and abstruse knowledge, upon the whole for human advantage and benefit? Only such civilisation can be justified as, taken all in all, is a blessing; if not (cried some) we may as well cling to the happiness of the barbarian.