In fact, the point of von Schlegel's pretentious, unilluminating book is to rehabilitate Christianity by making it the key to that new conception of life which had taken shape among the enemies of the Church.
7.
As biological development was one of the constant preoccupations of Goethe, whose doctrine of metamorphosis and "types" helped to prepare the way for the evolutionary hypothesis, we might have expected to find him interested in theories of social progress, in which theories of biological development find a logical extension.

But the French speculations on Progress did not touch his imagination; they left him cool and sceptical.

Towards the end of his life, in conversation with Eckermann, he made some remarks which indicate his attitude.

[Footnote: Gesprache mit Goethe, 23 Oktober 1828.] "'The world will not reach its goal so quickly as we think and wish.

The retarding demons are always there, intervening and resisting at every point, so that, though there is an advance on the whole, it is very slow.