This prolonged conflict with himself was
doubtless primarily due to his own inherited temperament, but it was
also in large measure owing to the character of the society and of the
time in which the period of his youth was passed. Had he been born
half a century earlier--that is to say, in a time when the current
speculation was bound up with a mechanical philosophy, and when the
limits of emotion were conditioned by strict conventional
standards--he might have been a youth of eccentric humours, but the
morbid fancies and wandering affections that consumed him could not
have come within his experience. But by the time when he began to
think and feel, Rousseau had written and opened the flood-gates of the
emotions, and Sterne had shown how accepted conventions might appear
in the light of a capricious wit and fancy which probed the surface of
things. In Goethe's letters, which are the most direct revelation of
his mental and moral condition during the period, the influence of
Rousseau and Sterne is visible on every page, and the fact has to be
remembered in drawing any conclusions as to the real state of his
mind from his language to his various correspondents.
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