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This article is based on research I did at the Descartes Centre for the History of Science and the Humanities of Utrecht University. I am grateful to Bert Theunissen, Frans van Lunteren, Hermione Giffard, Bas Jongeling and the referees of this journal for their valuable comments and helpful suggestions for this article. The Teylers Foundation of Haarlem has awarded its Gold Medal to this article and my book Synthetisch denken.
In 1918 the Dutch pedagogue Rommert Casimir analysed contemporary culture and society in the lead article of the first volume of De Opbouw, democratisch tijdschrift (Construction, a Democratic Journal).1 It was a remarkably optimistic article, considering that the First World War was still raging just across the borders of the neutral Netherlands. According to Casimir, the war was the last symptom of an age of fragmentation and destruction that was coming to an end. He predicted that it would be followed by an age of construction, marked by a universal quest for unity in all things. The new era would change not only international politics, but all aspects of society and culture, including the economy, religion, art and science. The future construction of society would provide the conditions for both material and spiritual development:
If I am right, then, having experienced bitterly how broken life is, we are approaching the time when we shall want to express again in our deeds, our institutions, and our scientific and artistic expressions, the longing for unity that has never disappeared, and that is now reviving strongly.2
For those who could see them, the first signs of the new era were already there. Casimir referred to the social legislation of recent decades, which he hailed as the first signs of a renewed social consciousness. But more important than that, he said, was the new philosophical and spiritual engagement of the intellectual elite since 1880: a renewed longing for wholeness after an age of fragmentizing analysis.3 An age of synthesis would replace the intellectual domination of Kant's thought that had characterized the nineteenth century. Naturalism and realism would give way to idealism or even Romanticism. But, he added, this new Romanticism would be fundamentally different from its early nineteenth-century...