The complex phenomena of biology, of the history of languages, or of industrial production, were not, in the last years of the eighteenth century, introduced into forms of rational analysis to which until then they had remained entirely foreign; nor was there a sudden interest provoked by the 'inﬂuence' of a budding 'romanticism' in the complex forms of life, history, and society; there was no detachment, under the pressure of its problems, from a rationalism subjected to the model of mechanics, to the rules of analysis and the laws of understanding.