How Goethe Set the Scene for Scientism, and Worse

You might think that the culture that allowed Nazism had been fully examined already, but M. D. Aeschliman, the distinguished American critic living in Switzerland, describes in the new St. Austin Review (edited by Joseph Pearce) the ways that Germany from the Enlightenment onward developed a truculent secularism that encouraged the National Socialists. See "Dissociation of Sensibility: The German Tragedy Revisited."

The most intriguing insight in this thorough essay is Aeschliman's observat...