"I now propose to say, however rash it may seem, what the heart of romanticism appears to me to be. I should like to go back again to a theme which I introduced earlier, namely the old tradition which is at the heart of all Western thought for at least two thousand years and more, before the middle of the eighteenth century - that particular attitude, those particular beliefs, which, it appears to me romanticism attacked and gravely damaged. I mean the old proposition that virtue is knowledge, a proposition which was explicitly enunciated, I suppose, for the first time by Socrates in the pages of Plato, and which is common to him and to the Christian tradition. What kind of knowledge, one may disagree about: there are battles between one philosopher and another, one religion and another, one scientist and another, between religion and science, between religion and art, between every kind of attitude and every kind of school of thought and every other, but the battle is invariably about what that true knowledge of reality is, the possession of which makes it possible for men to know what to do, how to fit in. It is agreed that there is a nature of things such that, if you know this nature, and know yourself in relation to this nature, and, if there is a divinity, you know this divinity, and understand the relationship between everything that composes the universe, then your goals as well as the facts about yourself must become clear to you, and you understand what it is that you should do if you are to fulfil yourself in the manner in which your nature cries out for you to do so. For this it is necessary to know whether this knowledge is knowledge of physics or psychology or theology, or some intuitive kind of knowledge, individual or public, whether it is confined to experts or may be known by every man. About all these things disagreement may occur, but that there is such knowledge - that is the foundation of the entire Western tradition, which, as I say, romanticism attacked. The view is that of a jigsaw puzzle of which we must fit in the fragments, of a secret treasure which we must seek."The essence of this view is that there is a body of facts to which we must submit. Science is submission, science is guided by the nature of things, scrupulous regard for what there is, non-deviation from the facts, understanding, knowledge, adaptation. The opposite of this, which is what the romantic movement proclaimed, may be summarised under two heads. One of these will by now be familiar, namely the notion of the indomitable will: not knowledge of values, but their creation, is what men achieve. You create values, you create goals you create ends, and in the end you create your own vision of the universe, exactly as artists create works of art - and before the artist has created a work of art, it does not exist, it is not anywhere. There is no copying, there is no adaptation, there is no learning of the rules, there is no external check, there is no structure which you must understand and adapt yourself to before you can proceed. The heart of the entire process is invention, creation, making, out of literally nothing, or out of any materials that may be to hand. The most central aspect of this view is that your universe is as you choose to make it, to some degree at any rate; that is the philosophy of Fichte, that is to some extent the philosophy of Schelling, that is the insight, indeed, in our own century even of such psychologists as Freud, who maintain that the universe of people possessed by one set of illusions or fantasies will be different from the universe of those possessed by another.
"The second proposition - connected with the first - is that there is no structure of things. There is no pattern to which you must adapt yourself. There is only, if not the flow, the endless self-creativity of the universe. The universe must not be conceived of as a set of facts, as a pattern of events, as a collection of lumps in space, three-dimensional entities bound together by certain unbreakable relations, as taught to us by physics, chemistry and other natural sciences; the universe is a process of perpetual forward self-thrusting, perpetual self-creation, which can be conceived of either as hostile to man, as by Schopenhauer or even to some extent by Nietzsche, so that it will overthrow all human efforts to check it, to organise it, to feel at home in it, to make oneself some kind of cosy pattern in which one can rest - either in that way, or as friendly, because by identifying yourself with it, by creating with it, by throwing yourself into this process, indeed by discovering in yourself those very creative forces which you also discover outside, by identifying on the one hand spirit, on the other hand matter, by seeing the whole thing as a vast self-organising and self creative process, you will at last be free.
" 'Understanding' is not the proper term to use, because it always presupposes the understander and the understood, the knower and the known, some kind of gap between the subject and the object; but here there is no object, there is only the subject, thrusting itself forward. The subject may be the universe, or the individual, or the class, the nation, the Church - whatever is identified as the truest reality of which the universe consists. But in any case it is a process of perpetual forward creation, and all schemas, all generalisations, all patterns imposed upon it are forms of distortion, forms of breaking. When Wordsworth said that to dissect is to murder, this is approximately what he meant; and he was much the mildest of those who expressed this point of view.
"To ignore this, to evade it, to attempt to see things as submissive to some kind of intellectualisation, some sort of plan, to attempt to draw up a set of rules, or a set of laws, or a formula, is a form of self-indulgence, and in the end suicidal stupidity. That at any rate is the semon of the romantics. Whenever you try to understand anything, by whatever powers you have, you will discover, as I have tried to explain, that what you are pursuing is inexhaustible, that you are trying to catch the uncatchable, that you are trying to apply a formula to something which evades your formula, because wherever you try to nail it down, new abysses open, and these abysses open to yet other abysses. The only persons who have ever made sense of reality are those who understand that to try to circumscribe things, to try to nail them down, to try to describe them, no matter how scrupulously, is a vain task. This will be true not only of science, which does this by means of the most rigorous generalisations of (to the romantics) the most external and empty kind, but even of scrupulous writers, scrupulous describers of experience - realists, naturalists, those who belong to the school of the flow of consciousness: Proust, Tolstoy, the most gifted diviners of every movement of the human spirit - even of those, to the extent to which they commit themselves to some kind of objective description, whether by external inspection, or by the most subtle introspection, the most subtle insight into the inner movements of the spirit. So long as they labour under the illusion that it is possible once and for all to write down, to describe, to give any finality to the process which they are trying to catch, which they are trying to nail down, unreality and fantasy will result - an attempt, always, to cage the uncageable, to pursue truth where there is no truth, to stop the unceasing flow, to catch movement by means of rest, to catch time by mean of space, to catch light by means of darkness. That is the romantic sermon."
http://world.std.com/~awolpert/gtr381.html