The intellectual excitement of nineteenth-century Germany was reflected by the Romantic and Existential movements, although both had international aspects as well. Both movements were to some extent reactions against the dominant idealism of rationalism, coming primarily from Kant’s views on the active mind, constructing reality. Fichte, von Schelling, and Hegel explored the implication of Kant’s philosophy, with Hegel coming to dominate the age. Romanticism found its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and exerted tremendous influence in art, literature as well as philosophy, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Recognizing the complexities of human experience, particularly in the dimensions of emotions, passions and desires, romanticism explored those aspects not readily explained by rational, intellectual processes. Existentialism was a direct reaction against rationalism and found initial expression in the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard, in Theology, and Dilthey, in psychology. Further, the Kantian notions of the strivings of the will and the unconscious were explored more fully by Schopenhauer and von Hartmann.

The theme of the essential activity of the mind provided the exciting intellectual setting that made a compelling case for psychology’s founding, and also gave rise to competing models of psychology. Structural or content psychology, championed by Wundt and Titchener, defined psychology as the experimental study of the data of immediate experience through the method of trained introspection. This natural science model sought to reduce the contents of consciousness to constituent elements of sensory origin. The restricted definition and ambiguous methodology led to challenges. Nevertheless, structural psychology secured recognition of psychology as a science, and Müller, Hering, and Ebbinghaus, attempted to modify structural psychology. Additionally, Mach and Avenarius bolstered the justification for psychology as a natural science. An alternative, described as a human science model, proposed more open definition and methodologies. Brentano’s act psychology stated that the phenomenological processes of psychological events are inseparable from the environment and consciousness. The works of Stumpf, Külpe, Dilthey and Bergson all fall into the human science model, but the lack of systematic theory reduced their successful competition with structural psychology. In many respects, the “founding” of modern psychology was a false beginning, and neither model established a lasting framework for psychology.

Allegory is an undeniably central feature of Renaissance literature. But it is often reduced to a Catholic or an anti-Catholic cliché. Too often, the entanglement of Catholic and Protestant interpretation and the survival of theological interests in biblical study are quickly downplayed. To document the continued importance of figurative reading in early-modern bible scholarship, this chapter views allegory broadly, as a manner of figurative reading evident in the way theologians practiced interpretation. It draws widely from a great variety of materials, roaming across the vast landscape of post-Reformation bible scholarship to suggest that the trouble with allegory was this: not that allegory exists, but that it must exist, it could never be overcome, and its division from the literal always remained fluid and tenuous. Biblical allegory becomes an expression of yet another “third force” in early modern religion, because the bible evaded a simple assertion of literalism and because it eluded confessional boundaries among the very people who helped create and police them.

The fifth chapter considers the narrative overlap of disciplinary filiation and the biographical. It does so through readings of Carl Justi’s biography of Winckelmann and Wilhelm Dilthey’s biographical work on Schleiermacher. Both were begun in the 1870s within a web of hermeneutic thinking about the biographical that characterized the Geisteswissenschaften and reflected back into the study of ancient biographical materials, too, and rendered scholars and their subject matter coextensive.