Romanticism, as almost any mention of the Romantic philosophers and poets is likely to remind us, was a spiritual revolt, a Promethean conspiracy to steal fire from the gods and to use it to drive them from their stronghold. The fire was consciousness, and it was mankind who would be installed in the gods' place. Romanticism looks forward to Marxism, to psychoanalysis, and to every significant modern attempt to persuade men to take control of their own destiny. Man, Feuerbach said, “is the beginning, the middle and the end of religion.” “In man,” said Nietzsche, “there is both the creator and the thing created.” Even more than the rather mechanical atheism which preceded it, Romanticism made possible a realistic engagement with humanity's problems, because it was with Romanticism that men began to grasp the seriousness of what they were doing in questioning their long-sacred beliefs – and yet remained determined to go on doing so. For too much of their history men had “forgotten” – as Blake claimed to be reminding us – the simple truth that “All deities reside in the human breast.”