He
reflects
the
character of the Germanic race in its totality.
character of the Germanic race in its totality.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v13 - Her to Hux
But such little poems as the
ones entitled 'Virtue,' 'The Pulley,' and 'The Collar' have force,
condensation of thought, and withal poetic grace; while 'Life' and
'The Rose' possess an Elizabethan freshness and charm.
One long poem, The Church Porch,' stands in marked contrast
to the rest of his work. It shows him as a young man, as yet un-
touched by thoughts of priestly consecration and the mental strug-
gles which afterwards beset him. Some of the terse couplets have
become almost proverbs:-
"Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie:
A fault which needs it most, grows two thereby. "
"For he that needs five thousand pounds to live
Is full as poor as he that needs but five. "
"Kneeling ne'er spoiled silk stockings. "
The quaintness of Herbert's verse is not its most engaging quality.
What is called quaintness is often mere perverseness of ingenuity,
showy affectation. Herbert's taste was like that of the red Indian,
preferring the bizarre, the artificial, and the ugly; while yet his inspi-
ration was genuine. His friendship for Donne no doubt confirmed
his liking for fantastic and over-labored verse. But with all his
defects, his best poetry has delighted pious hearts for more than two
centuries. The Temple, or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations,'
which contains his principal verses, was not published until after his
## p. 7254 (#34) ############################################
7254
GEORGE HERBERT
death. Walton said it was "a book in which, by declaring his own
spiritual conflicts, he hath comforted and raised many a dejected and
discomposed soul and charmed them with sweet and quiet thoughts. "
The pious Richard Baxter found, "next the Scripture poems," "none
so savoury" as Herbert's, who "speaks to God as a man really believ-
ing in God"; and Charles I. read the little book in his last melancholy
days in prison, and found "much comfort" in it.
hi
Of Herbert's sincere and even passionate piety in later life, there
is no doubt. He worked early and late for the bodies and souls of
flock, preaching, teaching, comforting, exposing himself to storms
and to sickness, wearing himself out in their service. Three years of
this terrible toil exhausted a constitution never strong, and he died
at Bemerton, loved and honored, at the early age of thirty-nine. In
his prose volume 'A Priest to the Temple' he has set forth the code
of duty which he followed:-
"The Country Parson desires to be all to his parish, and not only a pastor,
but a lawyer also, and a physician. Therefore he endures not that any of his
flock should go to law; but in any controversy, that they should resort to him
as their judge. To this end he hath gotten to himself some insight in things
ordinarily incident and controverted, by experience and by reading.
"Then he shows them how to go to law, even as brethren, and not as
enemies, neither avoiding therefore one another's company, much less defam-
ing one another. Now, as the parson is in law, so is he in sickness also: if
there be any of his flock sick, he is their physician,- or at least his wife, of
whom, instead of the qualities of the world, he asks no other but to have the
skill of healing a wound or helping the sick. . . . Accordingly, for salves,
his wife seeks not the city, but prefers her garden and fields before all out-
landish gums.
And surely hyssop, valerian, mercury, adder's-tongue, yarrow,
melilot, and St. John's-wort made into a salve, and elder, camomile, mallows,
comphrey, and smallage made into a poultice, have done great and rare
cures. In curing of any, the parson and his family use to premise prayers;
for this is to cure like a parson, and this raiseth the action from the shop
to the Church. »
[All the selections are from 'The Temple']
THE COLLAR
I
STRUCK the board and cried, "No more!
I will abroad.
What, shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
## p. 7255 (#35) ############################################
GEORGE HERBERT
7255
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure, there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it: there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures; leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not; forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and make to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Awake, take heed:
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's-head there: tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load. "
But as I raved, and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, "Child! »
And I replied, "My Lord! "
LOVE
L
OVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of lust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
"If I lacked anything. "
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here. "
Love said, "You shall be he. "
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee. "
## p. 7256 (#36) ############################################
7256
GEORGE HERBERT
Love took my hand, and smiling, did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I? »
"Truth, Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve. "
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame ? »
"My dear, then I will serve. "
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat. "
So I did sit and eat.
THE ELIXIR
EACH me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see,
And what I do in anything,
To do it as for thee.
T
Not rudely, as a beast,
To run into an action;
But still to make thee prepossest,
And give it his perfection.
A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy.
All may of thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture (for thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean.
A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for thy laws
Makes that and th' action fine.
This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.
## p. 7257 (#37) ############################################
GEORGE HERBERT
THE PILGRIMAGE
TRAVELED on, seeing the hill where lay
My expectation.
A long it was and weary way.
The gloomy cave of Desperation
I left on the one, and on the other side
The rock of Pride.
And so I came to Fancy's meadow, strowed
With many a flower;
Fain would I here have made abode,
But I was quickened by my hour.
So to Care's copse I came, and there got through
With much ado.
That led me to the wild of Passion, which
Some call the wold;
A wasted place, but sometimes rich.
Here I was robbed of all my gold,-
Save one good angel,* which a friend had tied
Close to my side.
At length I got unto the gladsome hill
Where lay my hope,
Where lay my heart; and climbing still,
When I had gained the brow and top
A lake of brackish waters on the ground
Was all I found.
With that, abashed and struck with many a sting
Of swarming fears,
I fell, and cried, "Alas, my King!
Can both the way and end be tears? "
Yet taking heart, I rose, and then perceived
I was deceived.
My hill was farther; so I flung away,
Yet heard a cry
Just as I went,-"None goes that way
And lives. " "If that be all," said I,
"After so foul a journey, death is fair,
And but a chair. "
7257
* A gold angel was a piece of money of the value of ten shillings, bearing
the figure of an angel.
## p. 7258 (#38) ############################################
7258
GEORGE HERBERT
THE PULLEY
HEN God at first made man,
W Having a glass of blessings standing by,—
"Let us," said he, "pour on him all we can:
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span. ”
So Strength first made a way;
Then Beauty flowed, then Wisdom, Honor, Pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
Rest in the bottom lay.
"For if I should," said he,
"Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.
"Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast. "
VIRTUE
SW
WEET Day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.
Sweet Rose, whose hue, angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
Sweet Spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.
## p. 7258 (#39) ############################################
## p. 7258 (#40) ############################################
HERDER.
## p. 7258 (#41) ############################################
7259
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER*
(1744-1803)
BY KUNO FRANCKE
ERDER does not belong to the few men of highest genius whose
works have become the common property of mankind. As
a poet he was receptive rather than creative.
Of his verse
only the Volkslieder' (Folk Songs: 1778-79), and 'Der Cid' (The Cid:
1803), have permanent value; and these are valuable not as additions
to the store of original conceptions of poetic fancy, but as marvels of
divinatory interpretation and sympathetic reproduction. As a prose
writer, he lacked the clearness of thought and the precision of speech
which are necessary elements of true literary greatness: even the best
of his essays are made unpalatable by a constant wavering between
diffuseness and abruptness, between vague generalities and dithyram-
bic effusions; and the most ambitious of his efforts, the 'Ideen zur
Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit' (Philosophy of the History
of Man: 1784-91), is a huge fragment.
Herder's greatness, then, does not lie in the form of his writings.
It lies in the suggestiveness of their substance. It lies in the wide
range of his vision, in the wonderful universality of his mind, which
enabled him to see the interdependence of all things and to divine
the unity of all life. It lies, above all, in the manifold application
of a single idea, an idea through which he became the father of the
modern evolutionary philosophy: the idea of organic growth.
Herder once for all did away with the rationalistic fallacy of the
eighteenth century, that the course of human history is nothing but
a succession of individual acts by individual men. He once for all
did away with the rationalistic fallacy that the great creations of the
human mind are the result of conscious and deliberate effort. He
once for all made the conception of national instincts and of national
culture the basis of all historical inquiry. All the great achieve-
ments of human civilization—language, religion, law, custom, poetry,
art — he considered as the natural products of collective human life,
as the necessary outgrowth of national instincts and conditions. Man
does not invent these things; he does not consciously set out to coin
*Parts of this article are reprinted, with the permission of the publishers,
from the author's Social Forces in German Literature,' Henry Holt, New
York, 1896.
## p. 7258 (#42) ############################################
Grusels
HERDER.
## p. 7258 (#43) ############################################
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## p. 7258 (#44) ############################################
HERDER.
## p. 7259 (#45) ############################################
7259
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER*
(1744-1803)
BY KUNO FRANCKE
H
ERDER does not belong to the few men of highest genius whose
works have become the common property of mankind. As
a poet he was receptive rather than creative. Of his verse
only the Volkslieder' (Folk Songs: 1778-79), and 'Der Cid' (The Cid:
1803), have permanent value; and these are valuable not as additions
to the store of original conceptions of poetic fancy, but as marvels of
divinatory interpretation and sympathetic reproduction. As a prose
writer, he lacked the clearness of thought and the precision of speech
which are necessary elements of true literary greatness: even the best
of his essays are made unpalatable by a constant wavering between
diffuseness and abruptness, between vague generalities and dithyram-
bic effusions; and the most ambitious of his efforts, the 'Ideen zur
Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Philosophy of the History
of Man: 1784-91), is a huge fragment.
Herder's greatness, then, does not lie in the form of his writings.
It lies in the suggestiveness of their substance. It lies in the wide
range of his vision, in the wonderful universality of his mind, which
enabled him to see the interdependence of all things and to divine
the unity of all life. It lies, above all, in the manifold application
of a single idea, an idea through which he became the father of the
modern evolutionary philosophy: the idea of organic growth.
Herder once for all did away with the rationalistic fallacy of the
eighteenth century, that the course of human history is nothing but
a succession of individual acts by individual men. He once for all
did away with the rationalistic fallacy that the great creations of the
human mind are the result of conscious and deliberate effort. He
once for all made the conception of national instincts and of national
culture the basis of all historical inquiry. All the great achieve-
ments of human civilization-language, religion, law, custom, poetry,
art — he considered as the natural products of collective human life,
as the necessary outgrowth of national instincts and conditions. Man
does not invent these things; he does not consciously set out to coin
*Parts of this article are reprinted, with the permission of the publishers,
from the author's Social Forces in German Literature,' Henry Holt, New
York, 1896.
## p. 7260 (#46) ############################################
7260
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
words, to establish a certain set of religious formulas, or to work out
certain problems of artistic composition. At least, this is not the
way in which the vital forms of a language, the great religious sym-
bols, or the ideal types of art and poetry, are created. They are not
created at all; they are not the work of individual endeavor: they are
the result of accumulated impressions exercised upon masses of human
beings living under similar conditions and similarly organized. In
other words, they are engendered and conceived in the nation as a
whole; the individual poets, artists, prophets, through whom they are
given their audible or visible shape, are only, as it were, the most
receptive and at the same time the most productive organs of the
national body. They are the channels through which a national lan-
guage, a national poetry, a national religion come to light.
Herder was not more than twenty-three years old when in the
'Fragmente über die Neuere Deutsche Literatur' (Fragments concern-
ing Recent German Literature: 1767), he first gave utterance to this
epoch-making idea. "There is the same law of change" - thus he
begins the second Fragment"in all mankind and in every indi-
vidual, nation, and tribe. From the bad to the good, from the good
to the better and best, from the best to the less good, from the less
good to the bad-this is the circle of all things. So it is with art
and science: they grow, blossom, ripen, and decay. So it is with
language also. " A primitive people, like a child, stares at all things;
fright, fear, admiration, are the only emotions of which it is capable,
and the language of these emotions consists of high-pitched, inarticu-
late sounds and violent gestures. This is the first, prehistoric, infant-
ile period in the history of a language. Then follows the period of
youth. With the increasing knowledge of things, fright and wonder
are softened. Man comes to be more familiar with his surroundings,
his life becomes more civilized. But as yet he is in close contact
with nature; affections, emotions, sensuous impressions have more
influence upon his conduct than principles and thought. This is the
age of poetry. The language now is a melodious echo of the outer
world; it is full of images and metaphors, it is free and natural in its
construction. The whole life of the people is poetry. "Battles and
victories, fables and moral reflections, laws and mythology, are now
contained in song. " The third period is the age of manhood. The
social fabric grows more complicated, the laws of conduct become
more artificial, the intellect obtains the ascendency over the emotions.
Literature also takes part in this change. The language becomes
more abstract; it strives for regularity, for order; it gains in intel-
lectual strength and loses in sensuous fervor: in other words, poetry
is replaced by prose. And prose, in its turn, after it has fulfilled the
measure of its maturity, sinks into senile correctness and sterility,
## p. 7261 (#47) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7261
thus rounding out the life of a given national literature and making
room for a new development.
Here we have the key of Herder's whole life work. Again and
again, in one way or another, he comes back to this conception of
literature as a manifestation of national culture. During his voyage
in 1769 from Riga to Nantes, he comes to understand the Homeric
epics as the poetic outgrowth of a seafaring people.
"It was seafarers," he writes in his diary, "who brought the Greeks their
earliest religion. All Greece was a colony on the sea. Consequently their
mythology was not like that of the Egyptians and Arabs, a religion of the
desert, but a religion of the sea and forest. Orpheus, Homer, Pindar, to be
fully understood, ought to be read at sea. With what an absorption one
listens to or tells stories on shipboard! How easily a sailor inclines to the
fabulous! Himself an adventurer, in quest of strange worlds, how ready is he
to imagine wondrous things! Have I not experienced this myself? With
what a sense of wonder I went on board ship! Did I not see everything
stranger, larger, more astounding and fearful than it was? With what curi-
osity and excitement one approaches the land! How one stares at the pilot,
with his wooden shoes and his large white hat! How one sees in him the
whole French nation down to their King, Louis the Great! Is it strange that
out of such a state of strained expectation and wonder, tales like that of the
Argonauts and poems like the Odyssey should have sprung? »
In common with the young Goethe and Justus Moeser, Herder in
1773 published the fliegende blätter Von Deutscher Art und Kunst. '
Here he applies the same principle to the study of old Scotch and
English poetry, and of popular song in general. He tells how on his
cruise in the Baltic and North Seas he for the first time fully appre-
ciated Ossian:-
«Suddenly borne away from the petty stir and strife of civilized life, from
the study chair of the scholar and the soft cushions of the salons, far removed
from social distractions, from libraries, from newspapers, floating on the wide
open ocean, suspended between the sky and the bottomless deep, daily sur-
rounded by the same infinite elements, only now and then a new distant
coast, a strange cloud, a far-off dreamland appearing before our vision, passing
by the cliffs and islands and sandbanks where formerly skalds and vikings
wielded their harps or swords, where Fingal's deeds were done, where Ossian's
melancholy strains resounded - believe me, there I could read the ancient
skalds and bards to better purpose than in the professor's lecture-room. »
He considers popular song as a reflex of primitive life; in its wild,
irregular rhythm he feels the heart-beat of a youthful, impulsive
people; its simple directness he contrasts with the false rhetoric of
modern book lyrics. The wilder-i. e. , the fuller of life and free-
dom a people is, the wilder-i. e. , the fuller of life, freedom, and
## p. 7262 (#48) ############################################
7262
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
sensuous power-must be its songs. The further removed a people
is from artificial thought and scientific language, the less its songs
are made for print and paper, the richer they are in lyric charm
and wealth of imagery. A savage either is silent, or he speaks with
an unpremeditated firmness and beauty which a civilized European
cannot equal; every word of his is clearly cut, concrete, living, and
seems to exhaust what it is meant to express; his mind and his
tongue are, as it were, tuned to the same pitch. Even in the appar-
ent abruptness and incoherency of popular song Herder sees an ele-
ment of beauty rather than a defect, inasmuch as it results from the
natural attitude of the unperverted mind toward the outer world.
"All the songs of primitive peoples turn on actual things, doings, events,
circumstances, incidents; on a living manifold world. All this the eye has
seen; and since the imagination reproduces it as it has been seen, it must
needs be reproduced in an abrupt, fragmentary manner. There is no other
connection between the different parts of these songs than there is between
the trees and bushes of the forest, the rocks and caverns of the desert, and
between the different scenes of the events themselves. When the Greenlander
tells of a seal-hunt, he does not so much relate as paint with words and ges-
tures single facts and isolated incidents: they are all part of the picture in
his soul. When he laments the death of a beloved one, he does not deliver
a eulogy or preach a funeral sermon, he paints; and the very life of the
departed, summoned up in a succession of striking situations, is made to speak
and to mourn. »
And not the Greenlander only,- thus Herder continues, not a
rude and primitive people only, feel and sing in this manner. All
the great poets of the world do the same: Homer, Sophocles, David,
Luther, Shakespeare - they all reflect the life which surrounds them;
they give us, as it were, instantaneous pictures of humanity as they
saw it: and thus they become for us an epitome of their time and
their nation. Herein, above all, lies the incalculable importance of
Shakespeare for us of to-day. For Shakespeare more fully than any
other poet has expressed the secret of our own life.
He reflects the
character of the Germanic race in its totality. He seems to have
heard with a thousand ears and to have seen with a thousand eyes;
his mind seems to have been a storehouse of countless living impres-
sions. King and fool, beggar and prince, madman and philosopher,
angels and devils in human form; the endless variety of individuals
and class types; the sturdy endeavor, the reckless daring of a people
hardened in the battle with wild elements, passionate but faithful,
lusty and sensual but at the same time longing for a deeper truth
and a purer happiness; -all this we see in his dramas in bold and
striking outline, and in it all we recognize our own self heightened
and intensified.
## p. 7263 (#49) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7263
A brief survey of Herder's later writings makes it clear that the
whole of his life was consumed in elaborating and amplifying this
one idea of national life as an organic growth. In the essay 'Von
Aehnlichkeit der Mittleren Englischen und Deutschen Dichtkunst'
(Similarity of the Middle English and German Poetry: 1779), he held
out the prospect of a history of civilization based upon the various
national literatures, thus clearly formulating the problem which liter-
ary history has been trying to solve ever since. In the Volkslieder'
(Folk Songs) of 1778 and 1779 he laid the foundation for a compara-
tive study of literature, by collecting and translating with wonderful
insight and faithfulness, popular songs and ballads from all over the
globe. In the book 'Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie' (The Spirit
of Hebrew Poetry: 1782-83) he considered the Psalms as poetic mani-
festations of Hebrew character. In the 'Philosophy of the History of
Man he represented the whole history of mankind as a succession of
national organisms: each revolving around its own axis; each living
out its own spirit; each creating individual forms of language, reli-
gion, society, literature, art; and each by this very individualization of
national types helping to enrich and develop the human type as a
whole. In the Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität' (Letters for
the Furthering of Humanistic Studies: 1793-97), finally, he held up the
ideal of perfect manhood to his own time and people, thus rounding
out his life by applying his highest inspirations to the immediate
demands of national progress.
Herder's influence on German culture cannot easily be overesti-
mated. He was the first among modern thinkers to whom every
individual appeared as a public character, as an heir of all the ages,
as an epitome of a whole nation. He first considered man in the
fullness of his instincts, in the endless variety of his relations to the
larger organisms of which he is a part. He first attempted on a
large scale to represent all history as an unbroken chain of cause
and effect, or rather as a grand living whole in whose development
no atom is lost, no force is wasted. Without him, Goethe would have
lacked the most inspiring teacher and the safest guide of his youth.
Without him, the brothers Grimm would have had no foundations
whereon to build the science of folk-lore. Without him, the whole
Romantic school would probably have been nothing but a repetition
of the Storm and Stress movement. Without him, there would have
been no Ranke. Without him, the theory of evolution would be
without one of its most exalted apostles.
Kuno Francke
## p. 7264 (#50) ############################################
7264
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
From the Philosophy of the History of Man'
NºT
or only has the philosopher exalted human reason to an
independency on the senses and organs, and the possession
of an original simple power; but even the common man
imagines, in the dream of life, that of himself he has become
everything that he is. This imagination is easily explained, par-
ticularly in the latter. The sense of spontaneity given him by
the Creator excites him to action, and rewards him with the
pleasing recompense of a deed performed in obedience to his
The days of his childhood are forgotten; the seeds
which he then received and still daily receives are dormant in
his mind; he sees and enjoys only the budding plant, and is
pleased with its flourishing growth, with its fruitful branches.
The philosopher, however, who studies the origin and progress
of a man's life in the book of experience, and can trace through
history the whole chain of the formation of our species, must, I
think, as everything brings dependence to his mind, soon quit
his ideal world, in which he feels himself alone and all-sufficient,
for our world of realities.
As man at his natural birth springs not from himself, equally
remote is he from being self-born in the use of his mental fac-
ulties. Not only is the germ of our internal disposition genetic,
as well as our bodily frame, but every development of this germ
depends on fate, which planted us in this place or in that, and
supplied us with the means by which we were formed, accord-
ing to time and circumstances. Even the eye must learn to see,
the ear to hear; and no one can be ignorant with what art
language, the principal instrument of our thought, is acquired.
Nature has evidently calculated our whole mechanism, with the
condition and duration of each period of our lives, for this for-
eign aid. The brain of infants is soft, and suspended from the
skull; its strata are slowly formed; it grows firmer with increas-
ing years, and gradually hardens till at length it will receive.
no more new impressions. It is the same with the organs and
with the faculties of a child: those are tender and formed for
imitation, these imbibe what they see and hear with wonderfully
active attention and internal vital power. Thus man is an arti-
ficial machine: endued with a genetic disposition, it is true, and
## p. 7265 (#51) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7265
plenitude of life; but the machine does not work itself, and the
ablest of mankind must learn how to work it. Reason is an
aggregate of the experiences and observations of the mind; the
sum of the education of man, which the pupil ultimately finishes
in himself, as an extraneous artist, after certain extraneous
models.
In this lies the principle of the history of mankind, without
which no such history could exist. Did man receive everything
from himself and develop everything independently of external
circumstances, we might have a history of an individual indeed,
but not of the species. But as our specific character lies in this,
that born almost without instinct, we are formed to manhood
only by the practice of a whole life, and both the perfectibility
and corruptibility of our species depend on it,-the history of
mankind is necessarily a whole; that is, a chain of socialness and
plastic tradition, from the first link to the last.
There is an education therefore of the human species, since
every one becomes a man only by means of education, and the
whole species lives solely in this chain of individuals. It is true,
should any one say that the species is educated, not the indi-
vidual, he would speak unintelligibly to my comprehension; for
species and genus are only abstract ideas except so far as they
exist in individuals: and were I to ascribe to this abstract idea
all the perfections of human nature, the highest cultivation
and most enlightened intellect that an abstract idea will admit,— I
should have advanced as far towards a real history of our species
as if I were to speak of animal-kind, stone-kind, metal-kind, in
general, and decorate them with all the noblest qualities, which
could not subsist together in one individual.
Our philosophy of history shall not wander in this path of the
Averroëan system; according to which the whole human species
possesses but one mind, and that indeed of a very low order, dis-
tributed to individuals only piecemeal. On the other hand, were
I to confine everything to the individual, and deny the existence
of the chain that connects each to others and to the whole, I
should run equally counter to the nature of man and his evident
history. For no one of us became man of himself: the whole
structure of his humanity is connected by a spiritual birth with
education, with his parents, teachers, friends; with all the circum-
stances of his life, and consequently with his countrymen and
their forefathers; and lastly with the whole chain of the human
XIII-455
-
――
## p. 7266 (#52) ############################################
7266
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
species, some link or other of which is continually acting on his
mental faculties. Thus nations may be traced up to families;
families to their founders; the stream of history contracts itself
as we approach its source, and all our habitable earth is ulti-
mately converted into the school of our family, containing indeed
many divisions, classes, and chambers, but still with one plan of
instruction, which has been transmitted from our ancestors, with
various alterations and additions, to all their race. Now, if we
give the limited understanding of a teacher credit for not having
made a separate division of his scholars without some grounds,
and perceive that the human species everywhere finds a kind of
artificial education, adapted to the wants of the time and place,-
what man of understanding, who contemplates the structure of
our earth and the relation man bears to it, would not incline to
think that the Father of our race, who has determined how far
and how wide nations should spread, has also determined this, as
the general teacher of us all? Will he who views a ship deny
the purpose of its builder? and who that compares the artificial
frame of our nature with every climate of the habitable earth,
will reject the notion that the climatic diversity of various man
was an end of the creation, for the purpose of educating his
mind? But as the place of abode alone does not effect every-
thing, since living beings like ourselves contribute to instruct us,
fashion us, and form our habits, there appears to me an educa-
tion of the species and a philosophy of the history of man, as
certainly and as truly as there is a human nature; that is, a
co-operation of individuals, which alone makes us men.
Hence the principles of this philosophy become as evident,
simple, and indubitable as the natural history of man itself is;
they are called tradition and organic powers. All education must
spring from imitation and exercise, by means of which the model
passes into the copy; and how can this be more aptly expressed
than by the term "tradition"? But the imitator must have
powers to receive what is communicated or communicable, and
convert it into his own nature as the food by means of which he
lives. Accordingly, what and how much he receives, whence he
derives it, and how he uses, applies it, and makes it his own,
must depend on his own, the receptive powers. So that the
education of our species is in a double sense genetic and organic:
genetic, inasmuch as it is communicated; organic, as what is
communicated is received and applied. Whether we name this
-
## p. 7267 (#53) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7267
second genesis of man cultivation from the culture of the ground,
or enlightening from the action of light, is of little import: the
chain of light and cultivation reaches to the end of the earth.
Even the inhabitant of California or Tierra del Fuego learns to
make and use the bow and arrow; he has language and ideas,
practices and arts, which he learned as we learn them: so far
therefore he is actually cultivated and enlightened, though in the
lowest order. Thus the difference between enlightened and un-
enlightened, cultivated and uncultivated nations, is not specific;
it is only in degree. This part of the picture of nations has infi-
nite shades, changing with place and time: and like other pictures,
much depends on the point of view from which we examine it.
If we take the idea of European cultivation for our standard, this
is to be found only in Europe; and if we establish arbitrary dis-
tinctions between cultivation and the enlightening of the mind,—
neither of which, if it be genuine, can exist independently of
the other, we are losing ourselves still more in the clouds.
But if we keep close to the earth and take a general view of
what Nature-to whom the end and character of her creatures
must be best known-herself exhibits to our eyes as forming
man, this is no other than the tradition of an education to some
form or other of human happiness and the economy of life. This
is as general as the human species; and often the most active
among savages, though in a narrower circle. If a man remain
among men, he cannot avoid this improving or vitiating cultiva-
tion: tradition lays hold of him, forms his head, and fashions his
limbs. As that is, and as these are fashioned, so is the man, so
is he formed. Even children whom chance has thrown among
beasts have acquired some human cultivation when they have
lived for a time among men, as most known instances show;
while a child brought up from the moment of his birth by a
brute would be the only uncultivated man upon earth.
What follows from this fixed point of view, confirmed as it
is by the whole history of our species? First a principle con-
solatory and animating to our lives, and inspiring this reflection:
namely, that as the human species has not arisen of itself, and as
there are dispositions in its nature for which no admiration can
be too high, the Creator must have appointed means, conceived
by his paternal goodness, for the development of these disposi-
tions. Is the corporal eye so beautifully formed in vain? does
it not find before it the golden beams of the sun, which were
---
## p. 7268 (#54) ############################################
7268
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
created for it as the eye for them, and fulfill the wisdom of its
design? It is the same with all the senses, with all the organs:
they find the means of their development, the medium for which
they were created. And can it be otherwise with the spiritual
senses and organs, on the use of which the character of man, and
the kind and measure of his happiness, depend? Shall the Cre-
ator have failed here of attaining his purpose; the purpose, too,
of all nature as far as it depends on the use of human powers ?
Impossible! Every such conjecture must arise from ourselves;
either attributing erroneous ends to the Creator, or endeavoring
as much as in us lies to frustrate his purposes. But as this
endeavor must have its limits, and no design of the All-wise can
be thwarted by a creature of his thoughts, let us rest secure in
the certainty, that whatever is God's purpose with regard to the
human species upon earth remains evident even in the most per-
plexing parts of its history. All the works of God have this
property: that although they belong to a whole which no eye can
scan, each is in itself a whole, and bears the Divine characters
of its destination. It is so with the brute and with the plant:
can it be otherwise with man? Can it be that thousands are
made for one? all the generations that have passed away, merely
for the last? every individual, only for the species,—that is, for
the image of an abstract name? The All-wise sports not in this
manner; he invents no fine-spun shadowy dreams; he lives and
feels in each of his children with paternal affection, as though
it were the only creature in the world. All his means are
ends; all his ends are means to higher ends, in which the Infinite,
filling all, reveals himself. What every man, therefore, attains
or can attain must be the end of the species; and what is this?
Humanity and happiness, on this spot, in this degree, as this
link and no other of the chain of improvement that extends
through the whole kind. Whatever and wherever thou wast born,
O man, there thou art and there thou shouldst be: quit not the
chain, set not thyself above it, but adhere to it firmly. Life and
happiness exist for thee only in its integrity, in what thou receiv-
est or impartest, in thy activity in each.
Secondly: Much as it may flatter man that the Deity has
admitted him as an assistant, and left the forming him here be-
low to himself and his fellow-creatures, the very choice of these
means shows the imperfection of our earthly existence, inasmuch
as we are not yet men, but are daily becoming so.
How poor
## p. 7269 (#55) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7269
must the creature be who has nothing of himself, but receives
everything from imitation, instruction, and practice, by which he
is molded like wax! Let the man who is proud of his reason
contemplate the theatre of his fellow-beings throughout the wide
world, or listen to their many-toned dissonant history. Is there
any species of barbarity to which some man, some nation, nay,
frequently a number of nations, have not accustomed themselves,
so that many, perhaps most, have even fed on the flesh of
their fellow-creatures? Is there a wild conception the mind can
frame, which has not been actually rendered sacred by heredi-
tary tradition in one place or another? No creature therefore
can stand lower than man; for throughout his whole life he is
not only a child in reason, but a pupil of the reason of others.
Into whatever hands he falls, by them he is formed; and I am
persuaded, no form of human manners is possible which some
nation or some individual has not adopted. In history every
mode of vice and cruelty is exhausted, while here and there only
a nobler train of human sentiments and virtues appears. From
the means chosen by the Creator, that our species should be
formed only by our species, it could not possibly be otherwise;
follies must be inherited, as well as the rare treasures of wisdom:
the way of man resembles a labyrinth, abounding on all sides
with divergent passages, while but few footsteps lead to the
innermost chamber. Happy the mortal who reaches it himself
or leads others to it; whose thoughts, inclinations, and wishes,
or even the beams of whose silent example, have promoted the
humanity of his brethren! God acts upon earth only by means
of superior, chosen men; religion and language, art and science,
nay, governments themselves, cannot be adorned with a nobler
crown than the laurels gathered from the moral improvement of
human minds. Our body molders in the grave, and our name
soon becomes a shadow upon the earth; but incorporated in the
voice of God, in plastic tradition, we shall live actively in the
minds of our posterity, even though our name be no more.
Thirdly: The philosophy of history, therefore, which follows
the chain of tradition, is, to speak properly, the true history of
mankind, without which all the outward occurrences of this
world are but clouds or revolting deformities. It is a melancholy
prospect to behold nothing in the revolutions of our earth but
wreck upon wreck, eternal beginnings without end, changes of cir-
cumstance without any fixed purpose.
The chain of improvement
## p. 7270 (#56) ############################################
7270
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
alone forms a whole of these ruins, in which human figures in-
deed vanish, but the spirit of mankind lives and acts immortally.
Glorious names, that shine in the history of cultivation as genii
of the human species, as brilliant stars in the night of time! Be
it that with the lapse of ages many of your edifices decay, and
much of your gold is sunk in the slough of forgetfulness: the
labors of your lives were not in vain, for such of your works as
Providence thought fit to save have been saved in other forms.
In any other way, no human monument can endure wholly and
eternally upon earth; being formed in the succession of genera-
tions by the hand of time for temporal use, and evidently preju-
dicial to posterity as soon as it renders unnecessary or retards
their further exertion. Thus the mutable form and imperfection
of all human operations entered into the plan of the Creator.
Folly must appear, that wisdom might surmount it; decaying
fragility even of the noblest works was an essential property of
their materials, that men might have an opportunity of exerting
fresh labors in improving or building upon their ruins; for we
are all here in a state of exercise. Every individual must depart;
and as it will then be indifferent to him what posterity may
do with his works, it would be repugnant to a good mind to
condemn succeeding generations to venerate them with inactive
stupidity, and undertake nothing of their own. This new labor
he wishes them; for what he carries with him out of the world
is his strengthened power, the internal ripe fruit of his human
activity.
Golden chain of improvement, that surroundest the earth and
extendest through all individuals to the throne of Providence,
since I perceived thee and traced thee in thy finest links, the
feelings of the parent, the friend, and the preceptor, history no
longer appears to me what it once did,- an abominable series of
desolations on a sacred earth. A thousand deeds of shame stand
there veiled with detestable praise, and thousands in their native
ugliness, to set off the rare true merit of active humanity; which
has ever proceeded on its way quietly and obscurely, seldom
aware of the consequences that Providence would educe from its
life, as the leaven from the dough. Only amid storms can the
noble plant flourish; only by opposing struggles against false pre-
tensions can the sweet labors of man be victorious. Nay, men
frequently appear to sink under their honest purposes; but it is
only in appearance: the seed germinates more beautifully in a
## p. 7271 (#57) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7271
subsequent period from the ashes of the good, and when irrigated
with blood seldom fails to shoot up to an unfading flower. I
am no longer misled, therefore, by the mechanism of revolutions;
it is as necessary to our species as the waves to the stream,
that it become not a stagnant pool. The genius of humanity
blooms in continually renovated youth, and is regenerated as it
proceeds, in nations, generations, and families.
Translation of T. Churchill.
APOTHEOSIS OF HUMANITY
From the Philosophy of the History of Man'
N°
O SOPHISTICAL argument can lead us to deny that our earth
has grown older in the course of some thousands of years;
and that this wanderer round the sun is greatly altered
since its origin. In its bowels we perceive how it once was con-
stituted; and we need but look around us to see its present con-
stitution. The ocean foams no longer,—it has subsided peaceably
into its bed; the wandering streams have found their shores; and
plants and animals have run through a progressive series of years
in their different races. As not a sunbeam has been lost upon
our earth since its creation, so no falling leaf, no wasted seed,
no carcass of a decaying animal, and still less an action of any
living being, has been without effect. Vegetation, for example,
has increased, and extended itself as far as it could; every living
race has spread within the limits nature assigned it, through the
means of others; and even the senseless devastations of man, as
well as his industry, have been active implements in the hand of
Time. Fresh harvests have waved over the ruins of the cities
he has destroyed; the elements have strewed the dust of oblivion
upon them; and soon new generations have arisen, who have
erected new buildings upon the old, and even with their ancient
remains. Omnipotence itself cannot ordain that effects shall not
be effects; it cannot restore the earth to what it was thousands
of years ago, so that these thousands of years, with all their con-
sequences, shall not have been.
Already, therefore, a certain progress of the human species is
inseparable from the progress of Time, as far as man is included
in the family of Time and Earth. Were the progenitor of man-
kind now to appear and view his descendants, how would he be
## p. 7272 (#58) ############################################
7272
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
astonished! His body was formed for a youthful earth; his frame,
his ideas, and his way of life, must have been adapted to that
constitution of the elements which then prevailed; and consider-
able alteration in this must have taken place in the course of six
thousand years or upwards. In many parts, America is no longer
what it was when discovered; two thousand years hence its an-
cient history will have the air of romance. Thus we read the
history of the siege of Troy, and seek in vain the spot where it
stood; in vain the grave of Achilles, or the godlike hero himself.
Were a collection of all the accounts that have been given of the
size and figure of the ancients, of the kind and quantity of their
food, of their daily occupations and amusements, and of their
notions of love and marriage, the virtues and the passions, the
purpose of life and a future existence, made with discriminating.
accuracy and with regard to time and place, it would be of no
small advantage toward a history of man. Even in this short
period, an advancement of the species would be sufficiently con-
spicuous to evince both the consistency of ever-youthful Nature
and the progressive changes of our old mother Earth. Earth
nurses not man alone; she presses all her children to one bosom,
embraces all in the same maternal arms: and when one changes
all must undergo change.
It is undeniable, too, that this progress of time has influenced
the mode of thinking of the human species. Bid a man now
invent, now sing, an Iliad; bid him write like Eschylus, like
Sophocles, like Plato: it is impossible. The childish simplicity,
the unprejudiced mode of seeing things,-in short, the youthful
period of the Greeks, is gone by. It is the same with the
Hebrews and the Romans; while on the other hand, we are
acquainted with a number of things of which both the Romans
and the Hebrews were ignorant. One day teaches another, one
century instructs another century; tradition is enriched; the muse
of Time, History, herself sings with a hundred voices, speaks
with a hundred tongues. Be there as much filth, as much con-
fusion, as there will, in the vast snowball rolled up by Time, yet
this very confusion is the offspring of ages, which could have
arisen only from the unwearied rolling on of one and the same
thing. Thus every return to the ancient times, even the cele-
brated Year of Plato, is a fiction; is, from the ideas of the world
and of time, an impossibility. We float onward; but the stream
that has once flowed returns no more to its source.
## p. 7273 (#59) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7273
Where are the times when people dwelt as troglodytes, dis-
persed about in caves behind their walls, and every stranger was
an enemy? Merely from the course of time, no cave, no wall,
afforded security. Men must learn to know one another; for
collectively they are but one family, on one planet of no great
extent. It is a melancholy reflection that everywhere they first
learned to know one another as enemies, and beheld each other
with astonishment as so many wolves; but such was the order of
nature. The weak feared the strong; the deceived, the deceiver;
he who had been expelled, him who could again expel him; the
inexperienced child, every stranger. This infantile fear, however,
and all its abuses, could not alter the course of nature; the bond
of union between nations was knit, though in a rough manner
owing to the rude state of man. Growing reason may burst the
knots, but cannot untwist the band, and still less undo the dis-
coveries that have once been made. What are the geologies of
Moses and Orpheus, Homer and Herodotus, Strabo and Pliny,
compared with ours? What was the commerce of the Phoenicians,
Greeks, and Romans, to the trade of Europe? Thus, with what
has hitherto been effected, the clue to the labyrinth of what is to
be done is given us. Man, while he continues man, will not
cease from wandering over his planet till it is completely known
to him: from this neither storms nor shipwreck, nor those vast
mountains of ice, nor all the perils of either Pole, will deter him;
no more than they have deterred him from the first most diffi-
cult attempts, even when navigation was very defective. The
incentive to all these enterprises lies in his own breast, lies in
man's nature. Curiosity, and the insatiable desire of wealth,
fame, discovery, and increase of strength, and even new wants
and discontents, inseparable from the present course of things,
will impel him; and they by whom dangers have been sur-
mounted in former times, his celebrated and successful predeces-
sors, will animate him. Thus the will of Providence will be
promoted both by good and bad incentives, till man knows and
acts upon the whole of his species. To him the earth is given;
and he will not desist till it is wholly his own, at least as far as
regards knowledge and use. Are we not already ashamed that
one hemisphere of our planet remained for so long a time as
unknown to us as if it had been the other side of the moon?
How vast the progress from the first raft that floated on the
water, to an European ship! Neither the inventor of the former,
## p. 7274 (#60) ############################################
7274
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
nor the many inventors of the various arts and sciences that
contribute to navigation, ever formed the least conception of
what would arise from the combination of their discoveries; each
obeyed his particular impulse of want or curiosity: but it is
inherent in the nature of the human intellect, and of the general
connection of all things, that no attempt, no discovery, can be
made in vain. Those islanders who had never seen a European
vessel beheld the monster with astonishment, as some prodigy of
another world; and were still more astonished when they found
that men like themselves could guide it at pleasure over the
trackless ocean. Could their astonishment have been converted
into rational reflection on every great purpose and every little
mean of this floating world of art, how much higher would their
admiration of the human mind have arisen! Whither do not the
hands of Europeans at present reach, by means of this single
implement? Whither may they not reach hereafter?
Besides this art, others innumerable have been invented within
the space of a few years by mankind, that extend their sway
over air and water, over earth and heaven. And when we
reflect that but few nations were engaged in this contest of men-
tal activity, while the greater part of the rest slumbered in the
lap of ancient custom; when we reflect that almost all our inven-
tions were made at very early periods, and scarcely any trace,
scarcely any ruin of an ancient structure or an ancient institu-
tion exists, that is not connected with our early history,— what
a prospect does this historically demonstrated activity of the
human mind give us for the infinity of future ages! In the few
centuries during which Greece flourished, in the few centuries
of modern improvement, how much has been perceived, invented,
done, reduced to order, and preserved for future ages, in Eu-
rope, the least quarter of the globe, and almost in its smallest
parts! How prolific the seeds that art and science have copiously
shed, while one nourishes, one animates and excites, the other!
As when a string is touched, not only everything that has music
resounds to it, but all its harmonious tones re-echo the sound till
it becomes imperceptible, so the human mind has invented and
created when a harmonious point of its interior has been hit.
When a new concord was struck in a creation where everything
is connected, innumerable new concatenations followed of course.
But it may be asked, How have all these arts and inventions
been applied? have practical reason and justice, and consequently
## p. 7275 (#61) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7275
the true improvement and happiness of the human species, been
promoted by them? In reply, I refer to what has recently been
urged respecting the progress of disorder throughout the whole
creation: that according to an intrinsic law of nature, nothing
can attain durability, which is the essential aim of all things,
without order. A keen knife in the hand of a child may wound
it; yet the art that invented and sharpened the knife is one of
the most indispensable of arts. All that use such a knife are
not children; and even the child will be taught by pain to use it
better. Artificial power in the hand of a despot, foreign luxury
in a nation without controlling laws, are such pernicious imple-
ments; but the very mischief they do will render men wiser, and
soon or late the art that created luxury as well as despotism
will first confine both within due bonds, and then convert them
into real benefits. The heavy plowshare wears itself out by long
use; the slight teeth of new watch-work gain, merely by their
revolution, the more suitable and artful form of the epicycloid.
Thus, in human powers, abuses carried to excess wear themselves
down to good practices, extreme oscillations from side to side.
necessarily settle in the desirable mean of lasting fitness in a
regular movement Whatever is to take place among mankind
will be effected by men; we suffer under our faults till we learn
of ourselves the better use of our faculties, without the assist-
ance of miracles from Heaven.
We have not the least reason, therefore, to doubt that every
good employment of the human understanding necessarily must
and will, at some time or other, promote humanity. Since agri-
culture has prevailed, men and acorns have ceased to be food
Man found that he could live better, more decently, and more
humanely, on the pleasing gifts of Ceres, than on the flesh of his
fellows or the fruits of the oak; and was compelled so to live by
the laws of men wiser than himself. After men had learned to
build houses and towns they ceased to dwell in caves; under the
laws of a commonweal, the poor stranger was no longer liable to
death. Thus trade brought nations together; and the more its
advantages were generally understood, the less murders, oppres
sions, and deceptions, which are always signs of ignorance in
commerce, would necessarily be practiced. Every addition to
the useful arts secures men's property, diminishes their labor,
extends their sphere of activity, and necessarily lays therewith the
foundations of further cultivation and humanity What labor was
## p. 7276 (#62) ############################################
7276
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
saved, for example, by the single invention of printing! what
an extensive circulation of men's ideas, arts, and sciences, did it
promote! Were a European Kang-Ti now to attempt to eradi-
cate the literature of this quarter of the globe, he would find it
impossible. Had the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the Greeks
and Romans, possessed this art, the destruction of their literature
would not have been so easy to their spoilers, if it could by any
means have been accomplished. Let savage nations burst in
upon Europe, they could not withstand our tactics; and no Attila
will again extend his march from the shores of the Black Sea
and the Caspian to the plains of Catalonia. Let monks, sybarites,
fanatics, and tyrants arise as they will, it is no longer in their
power to bring back the night of the Middle Ages. Now, as no
greater benefit can be conceived to arise from any art, Divine or
human, than not merely to bestow on us light and order but
from its very nature to extend and secure them, let us thank the
Creator that he conferred understanding on mankind, and made
art essential to it. In them we possess the secret and the means
of securing order in the world.
Neither need we any way repine that many excellently con-
ceived theories, of morals not excepted, have remained so long
without being carried into practice among mankind. The child
learns much which the man alone can apply; but he has not
therefore learned in vain. The youth heedlessly forgets what at
some future period he must take pains to recollect, or learn a
second time. So, no truth that is treasured up, nay, no truth
that is discovered, among a race continually renovating, is wholly
in vain: future circumstances will render necessary what is now
despised; and in the infinity of things, every case must occur that
can in any way exercise the human species.
ones entitled 'Virtue,' 'The Pulley,' and 'The Collar' have force,
condensation of thought, and withal poetic grace; while 'Life' and
'The Rose' possess an Elizabethan freshness and charm.
One long poem, The Church Porch,' stands in marked contrast
to the rest of his work. It shows him as a young man, as yet un-
touched by thoughts of priestly consecration and the mental strug-
gles which afterwards beset him. Some of the terse couplets have
become almost proverbs:-
"Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie:
A fault which needs it most, grows two thereby. "
"For he that needs five thousand pounds to live
Is full as poor as he that needs but five. "
"Kneeling ne'er spoiled silk stockings. "
The quaintness of Herbert's verse is not its most engaging quality.
What is called quaintness is often mere perverseness of ingenuity,
showy affectation. Herbert's taste was like that of the red Indian,
preferring the bizarre, the artificial, and the ugly; while yet his inspi-
ration was genuine. His friendship for Donne no doubt confirmed
his liking for fantastic and over-labored verse. But with all his
defects, his best poetry has delighted pious hearts for more than two
centuries. The Temple, or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations,'
which contains his principal verses, was not published until after his
## p. 7254 (#34) ############################################
7254
GEORGE HERBERT
death. Walton said it was "a book in which, by declaring his own
spiritual conflicts, he hath comforted and raised many a dejected and
discomposed soul and charmed them with sweet and quiet thoughts. "
The pious Richard Baxter found, "next the Scripture poems," "none
so savoury" as Herbert's, who "speaks to God as a man really believ-
ing in God"; and Charles I. read the little book in his last melancholy
days in prison, and found "much comfort" in it.
hi
Of Herbert's sincere and even passionate piety in later life, there
is no doubt. He worked early and late for the bodies and souls of
flock, preaching, teaching, comforting, exposing himself to storms
and to sickness, wearing himself out in their service. Three years of
this terrible toil exhausted a constitution never strong, and he died
at Bemerton, loved and honored, at the early age of thirty-nine. In
his prose volume 'A Priest to the Temple' he has set forth the code
of duty which he followed:-
"The Country Parson desires to be all to his parish, and not only a pastor,
but a lawyer also, and a physician. Therefore he endures not that any of his
flock should go to law; but in any controversy, that they should resort to him
as their judge. To this end he hath gotten to himself some insight in things
ordinarily incident and controverted, by experience and by reading.
"Then he shows them how to go to law, even as brethren, and not as
enemies, neither avoiding therefore one another's company, much less defam-
ing one another. Now, as the parson is in law, so is he in sickness also: if
there be any of his flock sick, he is their physician,- or at least his wife, of
whom, instead of the qualities of the world, he asks no other but to have the
skill of healing a wound or helping the sick. . . . Accordingly, for salves,
his wife seeks not the city, but prefers her garden and fields before all out-
landish gums.
And surely hyssop, valerian, mercury, adder's-tongue, yarrow,
melilot, and St. John's-wort made into a salve, and elder, camomile, mallows,
comphrey, and smallage made into a poultice, have done great and rare
cures. In curing of any, the parson and his family use to premise prayers;
for this is to cure like a parson, and this raiseth the action from the shop
to the Church. »
[All the selections are from 'The Temple']
THE COLLAR
I
STRUCK the board and cried, "No more!
I will abroad.
What, shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
## p. 7255 (#35) ############################################
GEORGE HERBERT
7255
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure, there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it: there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures; leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not; forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and make to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Awake, take heed:
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's-head there: tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load. "
But as I raved, and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, "Child! »
And I replied, "My Lord! "
LOVE
L
OVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of lust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
"If I lacked anything. "
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here. "
Love said, "You shall be he. "
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee. "
## p. 7256 (#36) ############################################
7256
GEORGE HERBERT
Love took my hand, and smiling, did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I? »
"Truth, Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve. "
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame ? »
"My dear, then I will serve. "
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat. "
So I did sit and eat.
THE ELIXIR
EACH me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see,
And what I do in anything,
To do it as for thee.
T
Not rudely, as a beast,
To run into an action;
But still to make thee prepossest,
And give it his perfection.
A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy.
All may of thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture (for thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean.
A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for thy laws
Makes that and th' action fine.
This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.
## p. 7257 (#37) ############################################
GEORGE HERBERT
THE PILGRIMAGE
TRAVELED on, seeing the hill where lay
My expectation.
A long it was and weary way.
The gloomy cave of Desperation
I left on the one, and on the other side
The rock of Pride.
And so I came to Fancy's meadow, strowed
With many a flower;
Fain would I here have made abode,
But I was quickened by my hour.
So to Care's copse I came, and there got through
With much ado.
That led me to the wild of Passion, which
Some call the wold;
A wasted place, but sometimes rich.
Here I was robbed of all my gold,-
Save one good angel,* which a friend had tied
Close to my side.
At length I got unto the gladsome hill
Where lay my hope,
Where lay my heart; and climbing still,
When I had gained the brow and top
A lake of brackish waters on the ground
Was all I found.
With that, abashed and struck with many a sting
Of swarming fears,
I fell, and cried, "Alas, my King!
Can both the way and end be tears? "
Yet taking heart, I rose, and then perceived
I was deceived.
My hill was farther; so I flung away,
Yet heard a cry
Just as I went,-"None goes that way
And lives. " "If that be all," said I,
"After so foul a journey, death is fair,
And but a chair. "
7257
* A gold angel was a piece of money of the value of ten shillings, bearing
the figure of an angel.
## p. 7258 (#38) ############################################
7258
GEORGE HERBERT
THE PULLEY
HEN God at first made man,
W Having a glass of blessings standing by,—
"Let us," said he, "pour on him all we can:
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span. ”
So Strength first made a way;
Then Beauty flowed, then Wisdom, Honor, Pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
Rest in the bottom lay.
"For if I should," said he,
"Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.
"Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast. "
VIRTUE
SW
WEET Day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.
Sweet Rose, whose hue, angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
Sweet Spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.
## p. 7258 (#39) ############################################
## p. 7258 (#40) ############################################
HERDER.
## p. 7258 (#41) ############################################
7259
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER*
(1744-1803)
BY KUNO FRANCKE
ERDER does not belong to the few men of highest genius whose
works have become the common property of mankind. As
a poet he was receptive rather than creative.
Of his verse
only the Volkslieder' (Folk Songs: 1778-79), and 'Der Cid' (The Cid:
1803), have permanent value; and these are valuable not as additions
to the store of original conceptions of poetic fancy, but as marvels of
divinatory interpretation and sympathetic reproduction. As a prose
writer, he lacked the clearness of thought and the precision of speech
which are necessary elements of true literary greatness: even the best
of his essays are made unpalatable by a constant wavering between
diffuseness and abruptness, between vague generalities and dithyram-
bic effusions; and the most ambitious of his efforts, the 'Ideen zur
Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit' (Philosophy of the History
of Man: 1784-91), is a huge fragment.
Herder's greatness, then, does not lie in the form of his writings.
It lies in the suggestiveness of their substance. It lies in the wide
range of his vision, in the wonderful universality of his mind, which
enabled him to see the interdependence of all things and to divine
the unity of all life. It lies, above all, in the manifold application
of a single idea, an idea through which he became the father of the
modern evolutionary philosophy: the idea of organic growth.
Herder once for all did away with the rationalistic fallacy of the
eighteenth century, that the course of human history is nothing but
a succession of individual acts by individual men. He once for all
did away with the rationalistic fallacy that the great creations of the
human mind are the result of conscious and deliberate effort. He
once for all made the conception of national instincts and of national
culture the basis of all historical inquiry. All the great achieve-
ments of human civilization—language, religion, law, custom, poetry,
art — he considered as the natural products of collective human life,
as the necessary outgrowth of national instincts and conditions. Man
does not invent these things; he does not consciously set out to coin
*Parts of this article are reprinted, with the permission of the publishers,
from the author's Social Forces in German Literature,' Henry Holt, New
York, 1896.
## p. 7258 (#42) ############################################
Grusels
HERDER.
## p. 7258 (#43) ############################################
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## p. 7258 (#44) ############################################
HERDER.
## p. 7259 (#45) ############################################
7259
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER*
(1744-1803)
BY KUNO FRANCKE
H
ERDER does not belong to the few men of highest genius whose
works have become the common property of mankind. As
a poet he was receptive rather than creative. Of his verse
only the Volkslieder' (Folk Songs: 1778-79), and 'Der Cid' (The Cid:
1803), have permanent value; and these are valuable not as additions
to the store of original conceptions of poetic fancy, but as marvels of
divinatory interpretation and sympathetic reproduction. As a prose
writer, he lacked the clearness of thought and the precision of speech
which are necessary elements of true literary greatness: even the best
of his essays are made unpalatable by a constant wavering between
diffuseness and abruptness, between vague generalities and dithyram-
bic effusions; and the most ambitious of his efforts, the 'Ideen zur
Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Philosophy of the History
of Man: 1784-91), is a huge fragment.
Herder's greatness, then, does not lie in the form of his writings.
It lies in the suggestiveness of their substance. It lies in the wide
range of his vision, in the wonderful universality of his mind, which
enabled him to see the interdependence of all things and to divine
the unity of all life. It lies, above all, in the manifold application
of a single idea, an idea through which he became the father of the
modern evolutionary philosophy: the idea of organic growth.
Herder once for all did away with the rationalistic fallacy of the
eighteenth century, that the course of human history is nothing but
a succession of individual acts by individual men. He once for all
did away with the rationalistic fallacy that the great creations of the
human mind are the result of conscious and deliberate effort. He
once for all made the conception of national instincts and of national
culture the basis of all historical inquiry. All the great achieve-
ments of human civilization-language, religion, law, custom, poetry,
art — he considered as the natural products of collective human life,
as the necessary outgrowth of national instincts and conditions. Man
does not invent these things; he does not consciously set out to coin
*Parts of this article are reprinted, with the permission of the publishers,
from the author's Social Forces in German Literature,' Henry Holt, New
York, 1896.
## p. 7260 (#46) ############################################
7260
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
words, to establish a certain set of religious formulas, or to work out
certain problems of artistic composition. At least, this is not the
way in which the vital forms of a language, the great religious sym-
bols, or the ideal types of art and poetry, are created. They are not
created at all; they are not the work of individual endeavor: they are
the result of accumulated impressions exercised upon masses of human
beings living under similar conditions and similarly organized. In
other words, they are engendered and conceived in the nation as a
whole; the individual poets, artists, prophets, through whom they are
given their audible or visible shape, are only, as it were, the most
receptive and at the same time the most productive organs of the
national body. They are the channels through which a national lan-
guage, a national poetry, a national religion come to light.
Herder was not more than twenty-three years old when in the
'Fragmente über die Neuere Deutsche Literatur' (Fragments concern-
ing Recent German Literature: 1767), he first gave utterance to this
epoch-making idea. "There is the same law of change" - thus he
begins the second Fragment"in all mankind and in every indi-
vidual, nation, and tribe. From the bad to the good, from the good
to the better and best, from the best to the less good, from the less
good to the bad-this is the circle of all things. So it is with art
and science: they grow, blossom, ripen, and decay. So it is with
language also. " A primitive people, like a child, stares at all things;
fright, fear, admiration, are the only emotions of which it is capable,
and the language of these emotions consists of high-pitched, inarticu-
late sounds and violent gestures. This is the first, prehistoric, infant-
ile period in the history of a language. Then follows the period of
youth. With the increasing knowledge of things, fright and wonder
are softened. Man comes to be more familiar with his surroundings,
his life becomes more civilized. But as yet he is in close contact
with nature; affections, emotions, sensuous impressions have more
influence upon his conduct than principles and thought. This is the
age of poetry. The language now is a melodious echo of the outer
world; it is full of images and metaphors, it is free and natural in its
construction. The whole life of the people is poetry. "Battles and
victories, fables and moral reflections, laws and mythology, are now
contained in song. " The third period is the age of manhood. The
social fabric grows more complicated, the laws of conduct become
more artificial, the intellect obtains the ascendency over the emotions.
Literature also takes part in this change. The language becomes
more abstract; it strives for regularity, for order; it gains in intel-
lectual strength and loses in sensuous fervor: in other words, poetry
is replaced by prose. And prose, in its turn, after it has fulfilled the
measure of its maturity, sinks into senile correctness and sterility,
## p. 7261 (#47) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7261
thus rounding out the life of a given national literature and making
room for a new development.
Here we have the key of Herder's whole life work. Again and
again, in one way or another, he comes back to this conception of
literature as a manifestation of national culture. During his voyage
in 1769 from Riga to Nantes, he comes to understand the Homeric
epics as the poetic outgrowth of a seafaring people.
"It was seafarers," he writes in his diary, "who brought the Greeks their
earliest religion. All Greece was a colony on the sea. Consequently their
mythology was not like that of the Egyptians and Arabs, a religion of the
desert, but a religion of the sea and forest. Orpheus, Homer, Pindar, to be
fully understood, ought to be read at sea. With what an absorption one
listens to or tells stories on shipboard! How easily a sailor inclines to the
fabulous! Himself an adventurer, in quest of strange worlds, how ready is he
to imagine wondrous things! Have I not experienced this myself? With
what a sense of wonder I went on board ship! Did I not see everything
stranger, larger, more astounding and fearful than it was? With what curi-
osity and excitement one approaches the land! How one stares at the pilot,
with his wooden shoes and his large white hat! How one sees in him the
whole French nation down to their King, Louis the Great! Is it strange that
out of such a state of strained expectation and wonder, tales like that of the
Argonauts and poems like the Odyssey should have sprung? »
In common with the young Goethe and Justus Moeser, Herder in
1773 published the fliegende blätter Von Deutscher Art und Kunst. '
Here he applies the same principle to the study of old Scotch and
English poetry, and of popular song in general. He tells how on his
cruise in the Baltic and North Seas he for the first time fully appre-
ciated Ossian:-
«Suddenly borne away from the petty stir and strife of civilized life, from
the study chair of the scholar and the soft cushions of the salons, far removed
from social distractions, from libraries, from newspapers, floating on the wide
open ocean, suspended between the sky and the bottomless deep, daily sur-
rounded by the same infinite elements, only now and then a new distant
coast, a strange cloud, a far-off dreamland appearing before our vision, passing
by the cliffs and islands and sandbanks where formerly skalds and vikings
wielded their harps or swords, where Fingal's deeds were done, where Ossian's
melancholy strains resounded - believe me, there I could read the ancient
skalds and bards to better purpose than in the professor's lecture-room. »
He considers popular song as a reflex of primitive life; in its wild,
irregular rhythm he feels the heart-beat of a youthful, impulsive
people; its simple directness he contrasts with the false rhetoric of
modern book lyrics. The wilder-i. e. , the fuller of life and free-
dom a people is, the wilder-i. e. , the fuller of life, freedom, and
## p. 7262 (#48) ############################################
7262
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
sensuous power-must be its songs. The further removed a people
is from artificial thought and scientific language, the less its songs
are made for print and paper, the richer they are in lyric charm
and wealth of imagery. A savage either is silent, or he speaks with
an unpremeditated firmness and beauty which a civilized European
cannot equal; every word of his is clearly cut, concrete, living, and
seems to exhaust what it is meant to express; his mind and his
tongue are, as it were, tuned to the same pitch. Even in the appar-
ent abruptness and incoherency of popular song Herder sees an ele-
ment of beauty rather than a defect, inasmuch as it results from the
natural attitude of the unperverted mind toward the outer world.
"All the songs of primitive peoples turn on actual things, doings, events,
circumstances, incidents; on a living manifold world. All this the eye has
seen; and since the imagination reproduces it as it has been seen, it must
needs be reproduced in an abrupt, fragmentary manner. There is no other
connection between the different parts of these songs than there is between
the trees and bushes of the forest, the rocks and caverns of the desert, and
between the different scenes of the events themselves. When the Greenlander
tells of a seal-hunt, he does not so much relate as paint with words and ges-
tures single facts and isolated incidents: they are all part of the picture in
his soul. When he laments the death of a beloved one, he does not deliver
a eulogy or preach a funeral sermon, he paints; and the very life of the
departed, summoned up in a succession of striking situations, is made to speak
and to mourn. »
And not the Greenlander only,- thus Herder continues, not a
rude and primitive people only, feel and sing in this manner. All
the great poets of the world do the same: Homer, Sophocles, David,
Luther, Shakespeare - they all reflect the life which surrounds them;
they give us, as it were, instantaneous pictures of humanity as they
saw it: and thus they become for us an epitome of their time and
their nation. Herein, above all, lies the incalculable importance of
Shakespeare for us of to-day. For Shakespeare more fully than any
other poet has expressed the secret of our own life.
He reflects the
character of the Germanic race in its totality. He seems to have
heard with a thousand ears and to have seen with a thousand eyes;
his mind seems to have been a storehouse of countless living impres-
sions. King and fool, beggar and prince, madman and philosopher,
angels and devils in human form; the endless variety of individuals
and class types; the sturdy endeavor, the reckless daring of a people
hardened in the battle with wild elements, passionate but faithful,
lusty and sensual but at the same time longing for a deeper truth
and a purer happiness; -all this we see in his dramas in bold and
striking outline, and in it all we recognize our own self heightened
and intensified.
## p. 7263 (#49) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7263
A brief survey of Herder's later writings makes it clear that the
whole of his life was consumed in elaborating and amplifying this
one idea of national life as an organic growth. In the essay 'Von
Aehnlichkeit der Mittleren Englischen und Deutschen Dichtkunst'
(Similarity of the Middle English and German Poetry: 1779), he held
out the prospect of a history of civilization based upon the various
national literatures, thus clearly formulating the problem which liter-
ary history has been trying to solve ever since. In the Volkslieder'
(Folk Songs) of 1778 and 1779 he laid the foundation for a compara-
tive study of literature, by collecting and translating with wonderful
insight and faithfulness, popular songs and ballads from all over the
globe. In the book 'Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie' (The Spirit
of Hebrew Poetry: 1782-83) he considered the Psalms as poetic mani-
festations of Hebrew character. In the 'Philosophy of the History of
Man he represented the whole history of mankind as a succession of
national organisms: each revolving around its own axis; each living
out its own spirit; each creating individual forms of language, reli-
gion, society, literature, art; and each by this very individualization of
national types helping to enrich and develop the human type as a
whole. In the Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität' (Letters for
the Furthering of Humanistic Studies: 1793-97), finally, he held up the
ideal of perfect manhood to his own time and people, thus rounding
out his life by applying his highest inspirations to the immediate
demands of national progress.
Herder's influence on German culture cannot easily be overesti-
mated. He was the first among modern thinkers to whom every
individual appeared as a public character, as an heir of all the ages,
as an epitome of a whole nation. He first considered man in the
fullness of his instincts, in the endless variety of his relations to the
larger organisms of which he is a part. He first attempted on a
large scale to represent all history as an unbroken chain of cause
and effect, or rather as a grand living whole in whose development
no atom is lost, no force is wasted. Without him, Goethe would have
lacked the most inspiring teacher and the safest guide of his youth.
Without him, the brothers Grimm would have had no foundations
whereon to build the science of folk-lore. Without him, the whole
Romantic school would probably have been nothing but a repetition
of the Storm and Stress movement. Without him, there would have
been no Ranke. Without him, the theory of evolution would be
without one of its most exalted apostles.
Kuno Francke
## p. 7264 (#50) ############################################
7264
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
From the Philosophy of the History of Man'
NºT
or only has the philosopher exalted human reason to an
independency on the senses and organs, and the possession
of an original simple power; but even the common man
imagines, in the dream of life, that of himself he has become
everything that he is. This imagination is easily explained, par-
ticularly in the latter. The sense of spontaneity given him by
the Creator excites him to action, and rewards him with the
pleasing recompense of a deed performed in obedience to his
The days of his childhood are forgotten; the seeds
which he then received and still daily receives are dormant in
his mind; he sees and enjoys only the budding plant, and is
pleased with its flourishing growth, with its fruitful branches.
The philosopher, however, who studies the origin and progress
of a man's life in the book of experience, and can trace through
history the whole chain of the formation of our species, must, I
think, as everything brings dependence to his mind, soon quit
his ideal world, in which he feels himself alone and all-sufficient,
for our world of realities.
As man at his natural birth springs not from himself, equally
remote is he from being self-born in the use of his mental fac-
ulties. Not only is the germ of our internal disposition genetic,
as well as our bodily frame, but every development of this germ
depends on fate, which planted us in this place or in that, and
supplied us with the means by which we were formed, accord-
ing to time and circumstances. Even the eye must learn to see,
the ear to hear; and no one can be ignorant with what art
language, the principal instrument of our thought, is acquired.
Nature has evidently calculated our whole mechanism, with the
condition and duration of each period of our lives, for this for-
eign aid. The brain of infants is soft, and suspended from the
skull; its strata are slowly formed; it grows firmer with increas-
ing years, and gradually hardens till at length it will receive.
no more new impressions. It is the same with the organs and
with the faculties of a child: those are tender and formed for
imitation, these imbibe what they see and hear with wonderfully
active attention and internal vital power. Thus man is an arti-
ficial machine: endued with a genetic disposition, it is true, and
## p. 7265 (#51) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7265
plenitude of life; but the machine does not work itself, and the
ablest of mankind must learn how to work it. Reason is an
aggregate of the experiences and observations of the mind; the
sum of the education of man, which the pupil ultimately finishes
in himself, as an extraneous artist, after certain extraneous
models.
In this lies the principle of the history of mankind, without
which no such history could exist. Did man receive everything
from himself and develop everything independently of external
circumstances, we might have a history of an individual indeed,
but not of the species. But as our specific character lies in this,
that born almost without instinct, we are formed to manhood
only by the practice of a whole life, and both the perfectibility
and corruptibility of our species depend on it,-the history of
mankind is necessarily a whole; that is, a chain of socialness and
plastic tradition, from the first link to the last.
There is an education therefore of the human species, since
every one becomes a man only by means of education, and the
whole species lives solely in this chain of individuals. It is true,
should any one say that the species is educated, not the indi-
vidual, he would speak unintelligibly to my comprehension; for
species and genus are only abstract ideas except so far as they
exist in individuals: and were I to ascribe to this abstract idea
all the perfections of human nature, the highest cultivation
and most enlightened intellect that an abstract idea will admit,— I
should have advanced as far towards a real history of our species
as if I were to speak of animal-kind, stone-kind, metal-kind, in
general, and decorate them with all the noblest qualities, which
could not subsist together in one individual.
Our philosophy of history shall not wander in this path of the
Averroëan system; according to which the whole human species
possesses but one mind, and that indeed of a very low order, dis-
tributed to individuals only piecemeal. On the other hand, were
I to confine everything to the individual, and deny the existence
of the chain that connects each to others and to the whole, I
should run equally counter to the nature of man and his evident
history. For no one of us became man of himself: the whole
structure of his humanity is connected by a spiritual birth with
education, with his parents, teachers, friends; with all the circum-
stances of his life, and consequently with his countrymen and
their forefathers; and lastly with the whole chain of the human
XIII-455
-
――
## p. 7266 (#52) ############################################
7266
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
species, some link or other of which is continually acting on his
mental faculties. Thus nations may be traced up to families;
families to their founders; the stream of history contracts itself
as we approach its source, and all our habitable earth is ulti-
mately converted into the school of our family, containing indeed
many divisions, classes, and chambers, but still with one plan of
instruction, which has been transmitted from our ancestors, with
various alterations and additions, to all their race. Now, if we
give the limited understanding of a teacher credit for not having
made a separate division of his scholars without some grounds,
and perceive that the human species everywhere finds a kind of
artificial education, adapted to the wants of the time and place,-
what man of understanding, who contemplates the structure of
our earth and the relation man bears to it, would not incline to
think that the Father of our race, who has determined how far
and how wide nations should spread, has also determined this, as
the general teacher of us all? Will he who views a ship deny
the purpose of its builder? and who that compares the artificial
frame of our nature with every climate of the habitable earth,
will reject the notion that the climatic diversity of various man
was an end of the creation, for the purpose of educating his
mind? But as the place of abode alone does not effect every-
thing, since living beings like ourselves contribute to instruct us,
fashion us, and form our habits, there appears to me an educa-
tion of the species and a philosophy of the history of man, as
certainly and as truly as there is a human nature; that is, a
co-operation of individuals, which alone makes us men.
Hence the principles of this philosophy become as evident,
simple, and indubitable as the natural history of man itself is;
they are called tradition and organic powers. All education must
spring from imitation and exercise, by means of which the model
passes into the copy; and how can this be more aptly expressed
than by the term "tradition"? But the imitator must have
powers to receive what is communicated or communicable, and
convert it into his own nature as the food by means of which he
lives. Accordingly, what and how much he receives, whence he
derives it, and how he uses, applies it, and makes it his own,
must depend on his own, the receptive powers. So that the
education of our species is in a double sense genetic and organic:
genetic, inasmuch as it is communicated; organic, as what is
communicated is received and applied. Whether we name this
-
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JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7267
second genesis of man cultivation from the culture of the ground,
or enlightening from the action of light, is of little import: the
chain of light and cultivation reaches to the end of the earth.
Even the inhabitant of California or Tierra del Fuego learns to
make and use the bow and arrow; he has language and ideas,
practices and arts, which he learned as we learn them: so far
therefore he is actually cultivated and enlightened, though in the
lowest order. Thus the difference between enlightened and un-
enlightened, cultivated and uncultivated nations, is not specific;
it is only in degree. This part of the picture of nations has infi-
nite shades, changing with place and time: and like other pictures,
much depends on the point of view from which we examine it.
If we take the idea of European cultivation for our standard, this
is to be found only in Europe; and if we establish arbitrary dis-
tinctions between cultivation and the enlightening of the mind,—
neither of which, if it be genuine, can exist independently of
the other, we are losing ourselves still more in the clouds.
But if we keep close to the earth and take a general view of
what Nature-to whom the end and character of her creatures
must be best known-herself exhibits to our eyes as forming
man, this is no other than the tradition of an education to some
form or other of human happiness and the economy of life. This
is as general as the human species; and often the most active
among savages, though in a narrower circle. If a man remain
among men, he cannot avoid this improving or vitiating cultiva-
tion: tradition lays hold of him, forms his head, and fashions his
limbs. As that is, and as these are fashioned, so is the man, so
is he formed. Even children whom chance has thrown among
beasts have acquired some human cultivation when they have
lived for a time among men, as most known instances show;
while a child brought up from the moment of his birth by a
brute would be the only uncultivated man upon earth.
What follows from this fixed point of view, confirmed as it
is by the whole history of our species? First a principle con-
solatory and animating to our lives, and inspiring this reflection:
namely, that as the human species has not arisen of itself, and as
there are dispositions in its nature for which no admiration can
be too high, the Creator must have appointed means, conceived
by his paternal goodness, for the development of these disposi-
tions. Is the corporal eye so beautifully formed in vain? does
it not find before it the golden beams of the sun, which were
---
## p. 7268 (#54) ############################################
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JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
created for it as the eye for them, and fulfill the wisdom of its
design? It is the same with all the senses, with all the organs:
they find the means of their development, the medium for which
they were created. And can it be otherwise with the spiritual
senses and organs, on the use of which the character of man, and
the kind and measure of his happiness, depend? Shall the Cre-
ator have failed here of attaining his purpose; the purpose, too,
of all nature as far as it depends on the use of human powers ?
Impossible! Every such conjecture must arise from ourselves;
either attributing erroneous ends to the Creator, or endeavoring
as much as in us lies to frustrate his purposes. But as this
endeavor must have its limits, and no design of the All-wise can
be thwarted by a creature of his thoughts, let us rest secure in
the certainty, that whatever is God's purpose with regard to the
human species upon earth remains evident even in the most per-
plexing parts of its history. All the works of God have this
property: that although they belong to a whole which no eye can
scan, each is in itself a whole, and bears the Divine characters
of its destination. It is so with the brute and with the plant:
can it be otherwise with man? Can it be that thousands are
made for one? all the generations that have passed away, merely
for the last? every individual, only for the species,—that is, for
the image of an abstract name? The All-wise sports not in this
manner; he invents no fine-spun shadowy dreams; he lives and
feels in each of his children with paternal affection, as though
it were the only creature in the world. All his means are
ends; all his ends are means to higher ends, in which the Infinite,
filling all, reveals himself. What every man, therefore, attains
or can attain must be the end of the species; and what is this?
Humanity and happiness, on this spot, in this degree, as this
link and no other of the chain of improvement that extends
through the whole kind. Whatever and wherever thou wast born,
O man, there thou art and there thou shouldst be: quit not the
chain, set not thyself above it, but adhere to it firmly. Life and
happiness exist for thee only in its integrity, in what thou receiv-
est or impartest, in thy activity in each.
Secondly: Much as it may flatter man that the Deity has
admitted him as an assistant, and left the forming him here be-
low to himself and his fellow-creatures, the very choice of these
means shows the imperfection of our earthly existence, inasmuch
as we are not yet men, but are daily becoming so.
How poor
## p. 7269 (#55) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7269
must the creature be who has nothing of himself, but receives
everything from imitation, instruction, and practice, by which he
is molded like wax! Let the man who is proud of his reason
contemplate the theatre of his fellow-beings throughout the wide
world, or listen to their many-toned dissonant history. Is there
any species of barbarity to which some man, some nation, nay,
frequently a number of nations, have not accustomed themselves,
so that many, perhaps most, have even fed on the flesh of
their fellow-creatures? Is there a wild conception the mind can
frame, which has not been actually rendered sacred by heredi-
tary tradition in one place or another? No creature therefore
can stand lower than man; for throughout his whole life he is
not only a child in reason, but a pupil of the reason of others.
Into whatever hands he falls, by them he is formed; and I am
persuaded, no form of human manners is possible which some
nation or some individual has not adopted. In history every
mode of vice and cruelty is exhausted, while here and there only
a nobler train of human sentiments and virtues appears. From
the means chosen by the Creator, that our species should be
formed only by our species, it could not possibly be otherwise;
follies must be inherited, as well as the rare treasures of wisdom:
the way of man resembles a labyrinth, abounding on all sides
with divergent passages, while but few footsteps lead to the
innermost chamber. Happy the mortal who reaches it himself
or leads others to it; whose thoughts, inclinations, and wishes,
or even the beams of whose silent example, have promoted the
humanity of his brethren! God acts upon earth only by means
of superior, chosen men; religion and language, art and science,
nay, governments themselves, cannot be adorned with a nobler
crown than the laurels gathered from the moral improvement of
human minds. Our body molders in the grave, and our name
soon becomes a shadow upon the earth; but incorporated in the
voice of God, in plastic tradition, we shall live actively in the
minds of our posterity, even though our name be no more.
Thirdly: The philosophy of history, therefore, which follows
the chain of tradition, is, to speak properly, the true history of
mankind, without which all the outward occurrences of this
world are but clouds or revolting deformities. It is a melancholy
prospect to behold nothing in the revolutions of our earth but
wreck upon wreck, eternal beginnings without end, changes of cir-
cumstance without any fixed purpose.
The chain of improvement
## p. 7270 (#56) ############################################
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JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
alone forms a whole of these ruins, in which human figures in-
deed vanish, but the spirit of mankind lives and acts immortally.
Glorious names, that shine in the history of cultivation as genii
of the human species, as brilliant stars in the night of time! Be
it that with the lapse of ages many of your edifices decay, and
much of your gold is sunk in the slough of forgetfulness: the
labors of your lives were not in vain, for such of your works as
Providence thought fit to save have been saved in other forms.
In any other way, no human monument can endure wholly and
eternally upon earth; being formed in the succession of genera-
tions by the hand of time for temporal use, and evidently preju-
dicial to posterity as soon as it renders unnecessary or retards
their further exertion. Thus the mutable form and imperfection
of all human operations entered into the plan of the Creator.
Folly must appear, that wisdom might surmount it; decaying
fragility even of the noblest works was an essential property of
their materials, that men might have an opportunity of exerting
fresh labors in improving or building upon their ruins; for we
are all here in a state of exercise. Every individual must depart;
and as it will then be indifferent to him what posterity may
do with his works, it would be repugnant to a good mind to
condemn succeeding generations to venerate them with inactive
stupidity, and undertake nothing of their own. This new labor
he wishes them; for what he carries with him out of the world
is his strengthened power, the internal ripe fruit of his human
activity.
Golden chain of improvement, that surroundest the earth and
extendest through all individuals to the throne of Providence,
since I perceived thee and traced thee in thy finest links, the
feelings of the parent, the friend, and the preceptor, history no
longer appears to me what it once did,- an abominable series of
desolations on a sacred earth. A thousand deeds of shame stand
there veiled with detestable praise, and thousands in their native
ugliness, to set off the rare true merit of active humanity; which
has ever proceeded on its way quietly and obscurely, seldom
aware of the consequences that Providence would educe from its
life, as the leaven from the dough. Only amid storms can the
noble plant flourish; only by opposing struggles against false pre-
tensions can the sweet labors of man be victorious. Nay, men
frequently appear to sink under their honest purposes; but it is
only in appearance: the seed germinates more beautifully in a
## p. 7271 (#57) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7271
subsequent period from the ashes of the good, and when irrigated
with blood seldom fails to shoot up to an unfading flower. I
am no longer misled, therefore, by the mechanism of revolutions;
it is as necessary to our species as the waves to the stream,
that it become not a stagnant pool. The genius of humanity
blooms in continually renovated youth, and is regenerated as it
proceeds, in nations, generations, and families.
Translation of T. Churchill.
APOTHEOSIS OF HUMANITY
From the Philosophy of the History of Man'
N°
O SOPHISTICAL argument can lead us to deny that our earth
has grown older in the course of some thousands of years;
and that this wanderer round the sun is greatly altered
since its origin. In its bowels we perceive how it once was con-
stituted; and we need but look around us to see its present con-
stitution. The ocean foams no longer,—it has subsided peaceably
into its bed; the wandering streams have found their shores; and
plants and animals have run through a progressive series of years
in their different races. As not a sunbeam has been lost upon
our earth since its creation, so no falling leaf, no wasted seed,
no carcass of a decaying animal, and still less an action of any
living being, has been without effect. Vegetation, for example,
has increased, and extended itself as far as it could; every living
race has spread within the limits nature assigned it, through the
means of others; and even the senseless devastations of man, as
well as his industry, have been active implements in the hand of
Time. Fresh harvests have waved over the ruins of the cities
he has destroyed; the elements have strewed the dust of oblivion
upon them; and soon new generations have arisen, who have
erected new buildings upon the old, and even with their ancient
remains. Omnipotence itself cannot ordain that effects shall not
be effects; it cannot restore the earth to what it was thousands
of years ago, so that these thousands of years, with all their con-
sequences, shall not have been.
Already, therefore, a certain progress of the human species is
inseparable from the progress of Time, as far as man is included
in the family of Time and Earth. Were the progenitor of man-
kind now to appear and view his descendants, how would he be
## p. 7272 (#58) ############################################
7272
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
astonished! His body was formed for a youthful earth; his frame,
his ideas, and his way of life, must have been adapted to that
constitution of the elements which then prevailed; and consider-
able alteration in this must have taken place in the course of six
thousand years or upwards. In many parts, America is no longer
what it was when discovered; two thousand years hence its an-
cient history will have the air of romance. Thus we read the
history of the siege of Troy, and seek in vain the spot where it
stood; in vain the grave of Achilles, or the godlike hero himself.
Were a collection of all the accounts that have been given of the
size and figure of the ancients, of the kind and quantity of their
food, of their daily occupations and amusements, and of their
notions of love and marriage, the virtues and the passions, the
purpose of life and a future existence, made with discriminating.
accuracy and with regard to time and place, it would be of no
small advantage toward a history of man. Even in this short
period, an advancement of the species would be sufficiently con-
spicuous to evince both the consistency of ever-youthful Nature
and the progressive changes of our old mother Earth. Earth
nurses not man alone; she presses all her children to one bosom,
embraces all in the same maternal arms: and when one changes
all must undergo change.
It is undeniable, too, that this progress of time has influenced
the mode of thinking of the human species. Bid a man now
invent, now sing, an Iliad; bid him write like Eschylus, like
Sophocles, like Plato: it is impossible. The childish simplicity,
the unprejudiced mode of seeing things,-in short, the youthful
period of the Greeks, is gone by. It is the same with the
Hebrews and the Romans; while on the other hand, we are
acquainted with a number of things of which both the Romans
and the Hebrews were ignorant. One day teaches another, one
century instructs another century; tradition is enriched; the muse
of Time, History, herself sings with a hundred voices, speaks
with a hundred tongues. Be there as much filth, as much con-
fusion, as there will, in the vast snowball rolled up by Time, yet
this very confusion is the offspring of ages, which could have
arisen only from the unwearied rolling on of one and the same
thing. Thus every return to the ancient times, even the cele-
brated Year of Plato, is a fiction; is, from the ideas of the world
and of time, an impossibility. We float onward; but the stream
that has once flowed returns no more to its source.
## p. 7273 (#59) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7273
Where are the times when people dwelt as troglodytes, dis-
persed about in caves behind their walls, and every stranger was
an enemy? Merely from the course of time, no cave, no wall,
afforded security. Men must learn to know one another; for
collectively they are but one family, on one planet of no great
extent. It is a melancholy reflection that everywhere they first
learned to know one another as enemies, and beheld each other
with astonishment as so many wolves; but such was the order of
nature. The weak feared the strong; the deceived, the deceiver;
he who had been expelled, him who could again expel him; the
inexperienced child, every stranger. This infantile fear, however,
and all its abuses, could not alter the course of nature; the bond
of union between nations was knit, though in a rough manner
owing to the rude state of man. Growing reason may burst the
knots, but cannot untwist the band, and still less undo the dis-
coveries that have once been made. What are the geologies of
Moses and Orpheus, Homer and Herodotus, Strabo and Pliny,
compared with ours? What was the commerce of the Phoenicians,
Greeks, and Romans, to the trade of Europe? Thus, with what
has hitherto been effected, the clue to the labyrinth of what is to
be done is given us. Man, while he continues man, will not
cease from wandering over his planet till it is completely known
to him: from this neither storms nor shipwreck, nor those vast
mountains of ice, nor all the perils of either Pole, will deter him;
no more than they have deterred him from the first most diffi-
cult attempts, even when navigation was very defective. The
incentive to all these enterprises lies in his own breast, lies in
man's nature. Curiosity, and the insatiable desire of wealth,
fame, discovery, and increase of strength, and even new wants
and discontents, inseparable from the present course of things,
will impel him; and they by whom dangers have been sur-
mounted in former times, his celebrated and successful predeces-
sors, will animate him. Thus the will of Providence will be
promoted both by good and bad incentives, till man knows and
acts upon the whole of his species. To him the earth is given;
and he will not desist till it is wholly his own, at least as far as
regards knowledge and use. Are we not already ashamed that
one hemisphere of our planet remained for so long a time as
unknown to us as if it had been the other side of the moon?
How vast the progress from the first raft that floated on the
water, to an European ship! Neither the inventor of the former,
## p. 7274 (#60) ############################################
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JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
nor the many inventors of the various arts and sciences that
contribute to navigation, ever formed the least conception of
what would arise from the combination of their discoveries; each
obeyed his particular impulse of want or curiosity: but it is
inherent in the nature of the human intellect, and of the general
connection of all things, that no attempt, no discovery, can be
made in vain. Those islanders who had never seen a European
vessel beheld the monster with astonishment, as some prodigy of
another world; and were still more astonished when they found
that men like themselves could guide it at pleasure over the
trackless ocean. Could their astonishment have been converted
into rational reflection on every great purpose and every little
mean of this floating world of art, how much higher would their
admiration of the human mind have arisen! Whither do not the
hands of Europeans at present reach, by means of this single
implement? Whither may they not reach hereafter?
Besides this art, others innumerable have been invented within
the space of a few years by mankind, that extend their sway
over air and water, over earth and heaven. And when we
reflect that but few nations were engaged in this contest of men-
tal activity, while the greater part of the rest slumbered in the
lap of ancient custom; when we reflect that almost all our inven-
tions were made at very early periods, and scarcely any trace,
scarcely any ruin of an ancient structure or an ancient institu-
tion exists, that is not connected with our early history,— what
a prospect does this historically demonstrated activity of the
human mind give us for the infinity of future ages! In the few
centuries during which Greece flourished, in the few centuries
of modern improvement, how much has been perceived, invented,
done, reduced to order, and preserved for future ages, in Eu-
rope, the least quarter of the globe, and almost in its smallest
parts! How prolific the seeds that art and science have copiously
shed, while one nourishes, one animates and excites, the other!
As when a string is touched, not only everything that has music
resounds to it, but all its harmonious tones re-echo the sound till
it becomes imperceptible, so the human mind has invented and
created when a harmonious point of its interior has been hit.
When a new concord was struck in a creation where everything
is connected, innumerable new concatenations followed of course.
But it may be asked, How have all these arts and inventions
been applied? have practical reason and justice, and consequently
## p. 7275 (#61) ############################################
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
7275
the true improvement and happiness of the human species, been
promoted by them? In reply, I refer to what has recently been
urged respecting the progress of disorder throughout the whole
creation: that according to an intrinsic law of nature, nothing
can attain durability, which is the essential aim of all things,
without order. A keen knife in the hand of a child may wound
it; yet the art that invented and sharpened the knife is one of
the most indispensable of arts. All that use such a knife are
not children; and even the child will be taught by pain to use it
better. Artificial power in the hand of a despot, foreign luxury
in a nation without controlling laws, are such pernicious imple-
ments; but the very mischief they do will render men wiser, and
soon or late the art that created luxury as well as despotism
will first confine both within due bonds, and then convert them
into real benefits. The heavy plowshare wears itself out by long
use; the slight teeth of new watch-work gain, merely by their
revolution, the more suitable and artful form of the epicycloid.
Thus, in human powers, abuses carried to excess wear themselves
down to good practices, extreme oscillations from side to side.
necessarily settle in the desirable mean of lasting fitness in a
regular movement Whatever is to take place among mankind
will be effected by men; we suffer under our faults till we learn
of ourselves the better use of our faculties, without the assist-
ance of miracles from Heaven.
We have not the least reason, therefore, to doubt that every
good employment of the human understanding necessarily must
and will, at some time or other, promote humanity. Since agri-
culture has prevailed, men and acorns have ceased to be food
Man found that he could live better, more decently, and more
humanely, on the pleasing gifts of Ceres, than on the flesh of his
fellows or the fruits of the oak; and was compelled so to live by
the laws of men wiser than himself. After men had learned to
build houses and towns they ceased to dwell in caves; under the
laws of a commonweal, the poor stranger was no longer liable to
death. Thus trade brought nations together; and the more its
advantages were generally understood, the less murders, oppres
sions, and deceptions, which are always signs of ignorance in
commerce, would necessarily be practiced. Every addition to
the useful arts secures men's property, diminishes their labor,
extends their sphere of activity, and necessarily lays therewith the
foundations of further cultivation and humanity What labor was
## p. 7276 (#62) ############################################
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JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
saved, for example, by the single invention of printing! what
an extensive circulation of men's ideas, arts, and sciences, did it
promote! Were a European Kang-Ti now to attempt to eradi-
cate the literature of this quarter of the globe, he would find it
impossible. Had the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the Greeks
and Romans, possessed this art, the destruction of their literature
would not have been so easy to their spoilers, if it could by any
means have been accomplished. Let savage nations burst in
upon Europe, they could not withstand our tactics; and no Attila
will again extend his march from the shores of the Black Sea
and the Caspian to the plains of Catalonia. Let monks, sybarites,
fanatics, and tyrants arise as they will, it is no longer in their
power to bring back the night of the Middle Ages. Now, as no
greater benefit can be conceived to arise from any art, Divine or
human, than not merely to bestow on us light and order but
from its very nature to extend and secure them, let us thank the
Creator that he conferred understanding on mankind, and made
art essential to it. In them we possess the secret and the means
of securing order in the world.
Neither need we any way repine that many excellently con-
ceived theories, of morals not excepted, have remained so long
without being carried into practice among mankind. The child
learns much which the man alone can apply; but he has not
therefore learned in vain. The youth heedlessly forgets what at
some future period he must take pains to recollect, or learn a
second time. So, no truth that is treasured up, nay, no truth
that is discovered, among a race continually renovating, is wholly
in vain: future circumstances will render necessary what is now
despised; and in the infinity of things, every case must occur that
can in any way exercise the human species.
