Romanticism was a movement that emerged during the French Revolution. It is believed to be the reaction to the Enlightenment. Enlightenment was a movement based on reason and rationality. Philosophes discussed the origin of the Earth and attempted to explain religion through rationality and empirical evidence. Romanticism, however, was the movement that was all about mind. For example, John Lock's ideas about knowledge would be completely rejected by the philosopher of the Romanticism, Immanuel Kant. Lock claimed that knowledge comes entirely from the outside, the environment. Kant was convinced that knowledge comes from the mind of a person. The two origins of Romanticism would be folklore and nationalism.

Folklore is all the songs, all the folk tales that were told in villages, cities, and even individual families. People do not need to be scholars or have any type of education, for that matter, in order to know those folk tales. Folklore differs from culture to culture, and from state to state. It was one of the origins of the Romanticism because it had nothing to do with rationality; it came entirely from one's mind and culture.

Nationalism is somewhat a branch of folklore. Those folk tales united people of one country and made then feel as a one whole nation, instead of just some factions. Nationalism was a part of Romanticism as well.