When, for example, Pascal makes the famous remark that the heart has its reasons as well as the head, when Goethe says that no matter how hard we try there will always be an irreducible element of anthropomorphism in everything we do and think, these remarks strike people as profound for this reason, because wherever we apply them they open new vistas, and these vistas are not reducible, not embraceable, not describable, not collectable; you have no formula which will by deduction lead you to all of them. This is the fundamental notion of depth in the romantics, and it is to this, in a large degree, that most of their talk about the finite standing for the infinite, the material standing for the immaterial, the dead standing for the living, space standing for time, words standing for something which is in itself wordless, relates. ‘Can the sacred be seized?’ asked Friedrich Schlegel, and he replied, ‘No, it can never be seized because the mere imposition of form deforms it.’ This is what runs through their entire theory of life and art.
- Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (1999), p. 104