Yet while the New Humanists argued that modern romanticism had a French lineage stemming back to Rousseau, Santayana argued instead that it was the most recent expression of a German idealistic egotism that dated to the Protestant Reforma-tion. Echoing the sentiments of early twentieth-century American Catholic thinkers and clergy, Santayana contended that German Protestantism was an unbridled celebration of individual will and a denial of the authority of the Gospels. He argued that German thinkers from Goethe and Kant down to Nietzsche had inherited Protestantism’s rejection of
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