In an exploration of the spirit of Goethe’s age, one historian writes, in words that echo Nietzsche on Apollo and Dionysus: For even rationality cannot get by without imagination, but neither can imagination without rationality. The marriage of the two is, however, of such a peculiar kind, that they carry on a life and death struggle, and yet it is only together that they are able to accomplish their greatest feats, such as the higher form of conceptualising that we are accustomed to call reason.
