ABSTRACT
Alfred North Whitehead coined the phrase “climate of opinion.” He observed that each age is characterized by its own subtle “ideological” climate. Shifts in a climate of opinion are equally subtle. They are difficult to observe when in process, but powerfully obvious they have occurred. One shift in the ideological mood can be observed between the religious thought of the Enlightenment period and the so-called Romantic Age in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Scholars disagree, of course, whether this shift constitutes a radical change or merely culminates existing patterns of thought. The fracturing of religious or divine authority reached its peak in the Enlightenment, which at the same time attempted a reversal of this trend in the search for a natural religion. The failure of Enlightenment religiosity to stop or to reverse the trend toward the dissolution of religious or divine authority becomes explicit in the Romantic Age.
