33. I am much indebted in these thoughts to Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 45–80, in a chapter called “The Historical Imagination between Metaphor and Irony,” and in particular (58) to the notion of the historical process apprehended in the Enlightenment “less as a development from one stage to another in the life of humanity than as merely an … unresolvable conflict between eternally opposed principles of human nature: rational on the one hand, irrational on the other,” and consequently, ironically.