About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe. The French Revolution had shown that the whole vocabulary of social relations, and the whole spectrum of social institutions, could be replaced almost overnight. The precedent made utopian politics the rule rather than the exception among the intellectuals. Utopian politics set aside questions about both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a hitherto unknown form of society. ~ Page 3

....... Kant wanted to consign science to the realm of second-rate truth -- truth about the phenomenal world. Hegel wanted to think of natural science as a description of spirit not yet fully conscious of its own spiritual nature, and thereby to elevate the sort of truth offered by the poet and the political revolutionary to first-rate status.