The Romantics yearned for a way to end this war in the cave. They wanted some way in which our Aristotelian instinct to engage our reason in the material world and our Platonic desire to realize our spiritual inner nature could be, if not finally reconciled, at least overcome. Of course, this wasn’t going to be easy. As we’ve seen, the creative drive of Western civilization had arisen not from a reconciliation of the two halves but from a constant alert tension between them.
