The very conception of the ‘speculative’ thinker, set apart from the contingencies of everyday living and coolly contemplating existence from a privileged vantage-point, was apt to arouse his suspicion, even antipathy; amongst other things, he was prone to treat it as involving a bland indifference to what mattered to people as individuals whose real interests found no recognition at the hands of ‘systematists and objective philosophers’. In the light of all this it is perhaps not surprising that some critics have portrayed him as being an extreme representative of the Romantic revolt against
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