The Romantic, continued

The quote from Isaiah Berlin's book somehow got all chopped up when blogger set it, which irritates me. Part of reading is layout. We compose prose and poetry, to some extent, with geometry framing the syntax and meter. So I will honor Mr. Berlin's words, and his readers, by retyping his language:

The sciences, if they were applied to human society, would lead to a kind of fearful bureaucratization, he thought. He was against scientists, bureaucrats, persons who made things tidy, smooth Lutheran clergymen, Deists, everybody who wanted to put things in boxes, everybody who wished to assimilate one thing to another, who wished to prove, for example, that creation was really the same thing as the obtaining of certain data which nature provided, and their rearrangement in certain pleasing patterns...Therefore the whole of the Enlightenment doctrine appeared to him to kill that which was living in human beings, appeared to offer a pale substitute for the creative energies of man, and for the whole rich world of senses, without which it is impossible for human beings to live, to eat, to drink, to be merry, to meet other people, to indulge in a thousand and one acts without which people wither and die. It seemed to him that the Enlightenment laid no stress on that, that the human being as painted by enlightenment thinkers was, if not "economic man", at any rate some kind of artificial toy...

Isaiah Berlin, on Johann Hamann