The inability of this common-sense outlook convincingly to bridge "feeling" and "thought", "body" and "mind", led to Immanuel Kant's epochal "critical" philosophy.

(The term, however, gave way to misunderstandings due to Baumgarten's use of the Latin in accordance with the German renditions, and consequently this has often led many to falsely undervalue his accomplishment.

Baumgarten's emphasis on the need for such "sensuous" knowledge was a major abetment to the "pre-Romanticism" known as Sturm und Drang (1765), of which Goethe and Schiller were notable participants for a time.

Wieland had just published his modern and ironic mirror-for-princes work, Der goldne Spiegel oder die Könige von Scheschian.

With Goethe's move to Weimar, his works steadily matured, aligning more with an aesthetic ideal that approached the content and form of classical antiquity.

On this Goethe remarked: The idea of the distinction between classical and romantic poetry [Dichtung[6]], which is now spread over the whole world, and occasions so many quarrels and divisions, came originally from Schiller and myself.

[8] Between 1786 and Schiller's death in 1805, he and Goethe worked to recruit a network of writers, philosophers, scholars, artists and even representatives of the natural sciences such as Alexander von Humboldt to their cause.

These are essentials used by Goethe and Schiller: Although the vociferously unrestricted, even "organic", works that were produced, such as Wilhelm Meister, Faust, and West-östlicher Divan, where playful and turbulent ironies abound,[10] may perceivably lend Weimar Classicism the double, ironic title "Weimar Romanticism",[11] it must nevertheless be understood that Goethe consistently demanded this distance via irony to be imbued within a work for precipitate aesthetic affect.

[12] Schiller was very prolific during this period, writing his plays Wallenstein (1799), Mary Stuart (1800), The Maid of Orleans (1801), The Bride of Messina (1803) and William Tell (1804).