Few men, and they are the greatest in the history, can do the role of the bridge between two ages («…two centuries, the former versus the other armed … and the arbiter sit down in middle of them». “The Five of May” of Manzoni) or better, can put the prelude for a turn in the history. After them the world changes. We can think to Caesar in the politic, to Christ in the way of the humanity toward the redemption and salvation, to Kant in the history of the thought, who leaved from the Enlightenment to ground in the Romanticism through the Idealism. Maybe that was not what he wished, but it happened. We can think that also without the Romanticism the Enlightenment would evolve in any case, but in a different direction. It is not possible neither for hypothesis, to think what, in absence, should be happened. It should evolve in a generalized cosmopolitism on the bottoms of the eighteenth-century French in a world without wars. But it is an ingenuous and optimistic thought.
In the Enlightenment there was something unsustainable, if, for reaction, the Romanticism rises, that in his turn produced the nationalism, that is the opposite of the cosmopolitism. The stimulus to create nations would seem the cause of the two twentieth-century World Wars. But also this is a disparaging and simplistic thought. The fact is that every movement has already in itself the prelude of what comes after. There are no jumps. There is a substantial continuity. The history shows that everything is evolutionism, no Darwinism, that is another matter.

(Translation by Giulia Bonazza)