Thomas Wilhelm

“The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the speculations of in the 'Protogaea' and of in his 'Théorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of , in the latter part of the eighteenth century; all these tended to show that the fabric of the earth itself implied the continuance of processes of natural causation for a period of time as great, in relation to human history, as the distances of the heavenly bodies from us are, in relation to terrestrial standards of measurement. The abyss of time began to loom as large as the abyss of space. And this revelation to sight and touch, of a link here and a link there of a practically infinite chain of natural causes and effects, prepared the way, as perhaps nothing else has done, for the modern form of the ancient theory of evolution.””

“alluding to Lange’s pathography , which rejected all productive influence of mental illness and only underscored its destructive effects: “Catatonia on the other hand completely diminished or destroyed his abilities; Hölderlin’s ‘madness’ has nothing to do with his genius” (Lange 1909, p. 216 f). While Lange essentially sought to apply psychiatric categories to apprehend the formally and linguistically unusual nature of Hölderlin’s art as an expression of alterity, Jaspers wanted to learn from the philologists. He was inspired not only by Hellingrath but also by Wilhelm Dilthey, whose 1906 collected volume Poetry and Experience included an essay on Hölderlin (Dilthey 1916). Jaspers describes this as the “most brilliant” interpretation of Hölderlin he had encountered””