Nothing further

The philosophical orientation towards autonomous rational thought which began in the West about the time of the Protestant Revolution, and whose first representatives in philosophy were Bacon and Descartes, has steadily grown and spread in the course of three and one-half centuries, sometimes proliferating into numerous separate systems, sometimes combining to produce their great summations, thus passing through all the stages of possible progress, and has finally attained the last, all-inclusive conclusion beyond which European man’s mind cannot aspire without completely changing its basic orientation. For when man rejects every authority except his abstract thinking, can he advance beyond the view which presents the whole existence of the world as the transparent dialectic of human reason, and human reason as the self-consciousness of universal being? Obviously, in this case, the ultimate goal which can be conceived by abstract reasoning separated from other cognitive faculties, is the goal he has been approaching for centuries, has now attained, and beyond which is nothing further to seek.
Ivan Kireevsky (1856)