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.
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.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v13 - Her to Hux
" This
darkness, however, was due far more to the matter than to the style
of the book. The latter indeed, if abrupt and terse, is powerful and
sublime, reminding us of the Hebrew prophets; while of the former,
Socrates said that its depth was so great as to require "a Delian
diver. "
HERACLITUS
Heraclitus claims to be self-taught; nevertheless he shows acquaint-
ance not only with Homer and Hesiod, but also with Pythagoras,
Xenophanes, Hecatæus, Archilochus, and Bias - and inveighs against
the whole of them, except the last. His originality therefore con-
sisted in the attitude of opposition which he assumed to his prede-
cessors. Combining the material principle of his Ionian predecessors
with the numerical proportion of Pythagoras and the all-embracing
unity of being of Xenophanes, he set up as his absolute a universal
fire, determining itself according to measure and number. Through
## p. 7248 (#28) ############################################
7248
HERACLITUS
the regulated self-transformation of this, the universe with all its
phenomena, including thought, arises. In this universe everything is
in perpetual change, except the Logos or law of change, which is
conceived as one with the primal fire. The universal life is a pro-
cess from fire and to fire, -a continual differentiation and a continual
overcoming of differentiation.
Heraclitus is the first materialistic monist, and all subsequent sys-
tems of monism descend from him. His views are discussed in the
'Cratylus of Plato, and are often referred to by Aristotle.
>
He
founded no school; but about 308 B. C. , Zeno of Citium, adopting his
leading principles, his Logos and his monism,-founded Stoicism,
which is thus mainly a development of Heracliteanism. Stoicism
played a great part in the world for six or seven hundred years, and
some of the noblest spirits of the ancient world professed it,― Marcus
Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, etc. It finds a very noble expression in
the Hymn to Zeus' by Cleanthes.
In modern times Hegel, by his own admission, adopted into his
Logic all the principles of Heraclitus, - the self-determining, world-
creating Logos, the identity of opposites, the universal process, etc. ,-
and thus gave them a new lease of life. Hegel himself by this
means reached an all-embracing idealism, which professed to furnish
a new basis for all the old notions of Church and State, which the
French Revolution had rudely shaken; but his disciple Ferdinand Las-
salle, who wrote a large work in two volumes on Heraclitus, empha-
sizing the latter's materialism, made it the basis of that view of the
world and of society which calls for Socialism as its true expression.
Indeed, Socialism is merely Heracliteanism in politics and economics.
Thus, in a very important sense, Heraclitus may be said to be the
father of Socialism, and to be very much alive among us to-day.
Besides Lassalle's work, already referred to (Die Philosophie
Herakleitos des Dunklen von Ephesos': Berlin, 1858), there are many
works on Heraclitus,- by Schleiermacher, Bernays, Schuster, Teich-
müller, Pfleiderer, and others. The best edition of the 'Fragments'
is that by I. Bywater, 'Heracliti Ephesii Fragmenta,' Oxford, 1877;
of the pseudo-Heraclitean letters, that by Jac. Bernays, Berlin, 1869.
-
FRAGMENTS
L
ISTENING, not to me, but to the Word, it is wise for men to
confess that all things are one.
Though the Word always speaks, yet men are born with-
out understanding for it, both before they hear it, and at first
after they have heard it. For though all things are produced
## p. 7249 (#29) ############################################
HERACLITUS
7249
according to this Word, men seem to be unaware of it, making
attempts at such words and deeds as I explain by separating
them according to their nature, and telling them as they are.
But other men fail as completely to recognize what they do
while they are awake as they forget what they do when asleep.
Having ears and understanding not, they are like deaf men. To
them the proverb applies: "While they're here they're yonder. "
Evil witnesses to men are the eyes and ears of them that
have barbarous souls.
For many men have no wisdom regarding those things with
which they come in contact, nor do they learn by experience.
They are opinions even to themselves.
If thou hope for that which is past hope, thou shalt not find
it; for it is past searching and past finding out.
Those who search for gold, dig much earth and find little.
Nature loves to hide herself.
The King whose oracle is in Delphi neither reveals nor con-
ceals, but indicates.
The Sibyl, with inspired lips, uttering words unmeet for laugh-
ter, unadorned, unanointed, reaches with her voice across a thou-
sand years, because of the god that is in her.
Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.
Much learning doth not teach understanding; else it had
taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, yea, and Xenophanes, and Heca-
tæus.
Pythagoras, the son of Mnesarchus, pursued information most
of all men, and making selections from these writings, he pro-
duced a wisdom of his own-much learning, little wit!
Of all the men whose words I have heard, no one hath gone
far enough to recognize that the Wise is separate from all things.
For the Wise is one-to know the principle whereby all
things are steered through all.
This world, which is the same for all, neither any god nor
any man made; but it was always, is, and ever shall be, an ever-
living fire, kindling by measure and dying out by measure.
Of fire, the transformations are, first, sea; and of sea half is
earth, half fire.
All things are exchanged for fire, and fire for all things; as
all goods are exchanged for gold, and gold for all goods.
The sea is spread abroad, and meted out with the same meas-
ure as it was before the earth was brought forth.
XIII-454
## p. 7250 (#30) ############################################
HERACLITUS
7250
Fire lives the death of earth, and air the death of fire. Water
lives the death of air, and earth the death of water.
The fire, when it cometh, shall try all things and overcome
all things.
The thunderbolt is at the helm of the universe.
The Sun shall not transgress his bounds; else the Fates, the
handmaids of Justice, will find it out.
God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace,
surfeit and famine. He changeth as fire when it is mingled with
spices, and is named as each man listeth.
You cannot step twice into the same river; for other and ever
other waters flow on.
War is the father of all things and the king of all things:
yea, some it appointed gods, and others men; some it made
slaves, and others free.
They understand not that that which differs agrees with itself:
a back-returning harmony, as of the bow and the lyre.
An invisible harmony is better than a visible.
Let us make no random guesses about the greatest things.
Asses would prefer garbage to gold.
The sea is the purest and the foulest water: for fishes drink-
able and wholesome; for men undrinkable and hurtful.
Immortals are mortal; mortals immortal, living each other's
death and dying each other's life.
It is death for souls to become water; and for water it is
death to become earth. But from earth is born water, and from
water soul.
The upward and the downward way are one and the same.
Beginning and end are identical.
The bounds of the soul thou shalt not find, though thou travel
every way.
Like a torch in the night, man is lit and extinguished.
A world-period is a child playing with dice. To a child be-
longs the sovereignty.
Into the same stream we step in and step not in; we are and
are not.
Common to all is wisdom. They who speak with reason must
take their stand upon that which is common to all, as firmly as a
State does upon its law, and much more firmly. For all human
laws are fed by the one Divine law; it prevaileth as far as it
listeth, and sufficeth for all, and surviveth all.
## p. 7251 (#31) ############################################
HERACLITUS
7251
Even they that sleep are laborers and co-workers in all that
is done in the world.
Though the Word is universal, most men live as if each had a
wisdom of his own.
We must not act and speak as if we were asleep.
When we
are awake we have one common world; but when we are asleep
each turns aside to a world of his own.
A foolish man bears the same relation to a divinity as a child
to a man.
The people must fight for its law as for a wall.
Those that fall in war, gods and men honor.
It is not better that what men desire should befall them: for
it is disease that causes health; sweet, bitter; evil, good; hunger,
satisfaction; fatigue, rest.
It is hard to fight with passion; for what it desires to happen,
it buys with life.
One man to me is ten thousand, if he be the best. For what
is their mind or sense? They follow [strolling] minstrels, and
make the mob their schoolmaster, not knowing that the evil are
many, the good few. For the best choose one thing in prefer-
ence to all, eternal glory among mortals; but the many glut
themselves like cattle. In Priene was born Bias, the son of
Teutames, whose intelligence was superior to that of all others.
It were fitting that the Ephesians should hang themselves on
reaching manhood, and leave the city to the boys; for that they
cast out Hermodorus, the worthiest man among them, saying:
"Let there be no one worthiest man among us; if there be, let
him be elsewhere and with others. "
Dogs bark at every one they do not know. A foolish man is
wont to be scared at every [new] idea.
Justice will overtake the framers and abettors of lies.
With man, character is destiny.
There remaineth for men after death that which they nei-
ther hope for nor believe. Then they desire to rise and become
guardians of the quick and the dead.
Polluted [murderers] are cleansed with blood, as if one, hav-
ing stepped into mud, should wipe himself with mud.
## p. 7252 (#32) ############################################
7252
GEORGE HERBERT
(1593-1633)
YOOX HE country clergyman whose verse made the little vicarage
at Bemerton in Wiltshire a place of pilgrimage for several
generations, was not a pious rustic, but the descendant of
an illustrious house and the favorite of a court. He came of the line
of Pembroke,- that handsome and learned swaggerer Lord Herbert
of Cherbury being his elder brother. Among his intimate friends.
were the poets Donne and Wotton, and his "best lover » Izaak Wal-
ton, who says of him that "he enjoyed his genteel humor for clothes
and courtlike company, and seldom looked
toward Cambridge (where he had a fellow-
ship) unless the King were there; and then
he never failed. " In short, "holy George
Herbert," handsome and ready-witted, full
of parts and ambition, singled out by King
James for special kindnesses, very naturally
expected and longed for that advancement
which less deserving courtiers found no dif-
ficulty in securing. But the death of the
King in 1625, followed by the death of the
young poet's powerful friends the Duke
of Richmond and the Marquis of Hamilton,
shattered his prospect of a Secretaryship.
Not long after, he took orders; partly, per-
haps, because his brilliant and persuasive mother had always wished
it, partly because no other profession becoming a gentleman was
open to a man already past thirty, with fine aptitudes but with no
special training, but surely in great part because the whole tone and
bent of his soul was not worldliness but other-worldliness. "
GEORGE HERBERT
In 1630 King Charles presented him, quite unexpectedly, with the
benefice of Bemerton near Salisbury.
"The third day after he was made rector," says Walton, "and had changed
his sword and silk clothes into a canonical habit, he returned so habited with
his friend Mr. Woodnot to Bainton; and immediately after he had seen and
saluted his wife (a kinswoman of the Earl of Danby), he said to her:- You
are now a minister's wife, and must now so far forget your father's house
as not to claim precedence of any of your parishioners; for you are to know
that a priest's wife can challenge no precedence or place but that which she
## p. 7253 (#33) ############################################
GEORGE HERBERT
7253
purchases by her obliging humility; and I am sure, places so purchased do
best become them. And let me tell you, I am so good a herald as to assure
you that this is truth. > And she was so meek a wife (though she was but
lately wed, after a three-days' courtship) as to assure him it was no vexing
news to her, and that he should see her observe it with a cheerful willingness. ”
Herbert took up his duties with an ardor that made them pleas-
In the first year of his priesthood he wrote:-
ures.
--
"I now look back upon my aspiring thoughts, and think myself more happy
than if I had attained what then I so ambitiously thirsted for; and I can
now behold the court with an impartial eye, and see plainly that it is made
up of fraud, and titles, and flattery, and many other such empty, imaginary,
painted pleasures-pleasures that are so empty as not to satisfy when they
are enjoyed. "
Nor were good Mr. Herbert's grapes really sour. For there was
that in his nature which made asceticism welcome, though his self-
abasement was not the less sincere because it was pleasurable. In-
deed, the chief attribute of his poetry is its quaint sincerity, often
expressed with the utmost artificiality. With scarcely an exception,
it is all of a religious character, frequently tinged with the ascetic's
ever-present sense of his shortcomings. 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) ############################################
M
ad
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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?
darkness, however, was due far more to the matter than to the style
of the book. The latter indeed, if abrupt and terse, is powerful and
sublime, reminding us of the Hebrew prophets; while of the former,
Socrates said that its depth was so great as to require "a Delian
diver. "
HERACLITUS
Heraclitus claims to be self-taught; nevertheless he shows acquaint-
ance not only with Homer and Hesiod, but also with Pythagoras,
Xenophanes, Hecatæus, Archilochus, and Bias - and inveighs against
the whole of them, except the last. His originality therefore con-
sisted in the attitude of opposition which he assumed to his prede-
cessors. Combining the material principle of his Ionian predecessors
with the numerical proportion of Pythagoras and the all-embracing
unity of being of Xenophanes, he set up as his absolute a universal
fire, determining itself according to measure and number. Through
## p. 7248 (#28) ############################################
7248
HERACLITUS
the regulated self-transformation of this, the universe with all its
phenomena, including thought, arises. In this universe everything is
in perpetual change, except the Logos or law of change, which is
conceived as one with the primal fire. The universal life is a pro-
cess from fire and to fire, -a continual differentiation and a continual
overcoming of differentiation.
Heraclitus is the first materialistic monist, and all subsequent sys-
tems of monism descend from him. His views are discussed in the
'Cratylus of Plato, and are often referred to by Aristotle.
>
He
founded no school; but about 308 B. C. , Zeno of Citium, adopting his
leading principles, his Logos and his monism,-founded Stoicism,
which is thus mainly a development of Heracliteanism. Stoicism
played a great part in the world for six or seven hundred years, and
some of the noblest spirits of the ancient world professed it,― Marcus
Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, etc. It finds a very noble expression in
the Hymn to Zeus' by Cleanthes.
In modern times Hegel, by his own admission, adopted into his
Logic all the principles of Heraclitus, - the self-determining, world-
creating Logos, the identity of opposites, the universal process, etc. ,-
and thus gave them a new lease of life. Hegel himself by this
means reached an all-embracing idealism, which professed to furnish
a new basis for all the old notions of Church and State, which the
French Revolution had rudely shaken; but his disciple Ferdinand Las-
salle, who wrote a large work in two volumes on Heraclitus, empha-
sizing the latter's materialism, made it the basis of that view of the
world and of society which calls for Socialism as its true expression.
Indeed, Socialism is merely Heracliteanism in politics and economics.
Thus, in a very important sense, Heraclitus may be said to be the
father of Socialism, and to be very much alive among us to-day.
Besides Lassalle's work, already referred to (Die Philosophie
Herakleitos des Dunklen von Ephesos': Berlin, 1858), there are many
works on Heraclitus,- by Schleiermacher, Bernays, Schuster, Teich-
müller, Pfleiderer, and others. The best edition of the 'Fragments'
is that by I. Bywater, 'Heracliti Ephesii Fragmenta,' Oxford, 1877;
of the pseudo-Heraclitean letters, that by Jac. Bernays, Berlin, 1869.
-
FRAGMENTS
L
ISTENING, not to me, but to the Word, it is wise for men to
confess that all things are one.
Though the Word always speaks, yet men are born with-
out understanding for it, both before they hear it, and at first
after they have heard it. For though all things are produced
## p. 7249 (#29) ############################################
HERACLITUS
7249
according to this Word, men seem to be unaware of it, making
attempts at such words and deeds as I explain by separating
them according to their nature, and telling them as they are.
But other men fail as completely to recognize what they do
while they are awake as they forget what they do when asleep.
Having ears and understanding not, they are like deaf men. To
them the proverb applies: "While they're here they're yonder. "
Evil witnesses to men are the eyes and ears of them that
have barbarous souls.
For many men have no wisdom regarding those things with
which they come in contact, nor do they learn by experience.
They are opinions even to themselves.
If thou hope for that which is past hope, thou shalt not find
it; for it is past searching and past finding out.
Those who search for gold, dig much earth and find little.
Nature loves to hide herself.
The King whose oracle is in Delphi neither reveals nor con-
ceals, but indicates.
The Sibyl, with inspired lips, uttering words unmeet for laugh-
ter, unadorned, unanointed, reaches with her voice across a thou-
sand years, because of the god that is in her.
Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.
Much learning doth not teach understanding; else it had
taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, yea, and Xenophanes, and Heca-
tæus.
Pythagoras, the son of Mnesarchus, pursued information most
of all men, and making selections from these writings, he pro-
duced a wisdom of his own-much learning, little wit!
Of all the men whose words I have heard, no one hath gone
far enough to recognize that the Wise is separate from all things.
For the Wise is one-to know the principle whereby all
things are steered through all.
This world, which is the same for all, neither any god nor
any man made; but it was always, is, and ever shall be, an ever-
living fire, kindling by measure and dying out by measure.
Of fire, the transformations are, first, sea; and of sea half is
earth, half fire.
All things are exchanged for fire, and fire for all things; as
all goods are exchanged for gold, and gold for all goods.
The sea is spread abroad, and meted out with the same meas-
ure as it was before the earth was brought forth.
XIII-454
## p. 7250 (#30) ############################################
HERACLITUS
7250
Fire lives the death of earth, and air the death of fire. Water
lives the death of air, and earth the death of water.
The fire, when it cometh, shall try all things and overcome
all things.
The thunderbolt is at the helm of the universe.
The Sun shall not transgress his bounds; else the Fates, the
handmaids of Justice, will find it out.
God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace,
surfeit and famine. He changeth as fire when it is mingled with
spices, and is named as each man listeth.
You cannot step twice into the same river; for other and ever
other waters flow on.
War is the father of all things and the king of all things:
yea, some it appointed gods, and others men; some it made
slaves, and others free.
They understand not that that which differs agrees with itself:
a back-returning harmony, as of the bow and the lyre.
An invisible harmony is better than a visible.
Let us make no random guesses about the greatest things.
Asses would prefer garbage to gold.
The sea is the purest and the foulest water: for fishes drink-
able and wholesome; for men undrinkable and hurtful.
Immortals are mortal; mortals immortal, living each other's
death and dying each other's life.
It is death for souls to become water; and for water it is
death to become earth. But from earth is born water, and from
water soul.
The upward and the downward way are one and the same.
Beginning and end are identical.
The bounds of the soul thou shalt not find, though thou travel
every way.
Like a torch in the night, man is lit and extinguished.
A world-period is a child playing with dice. To a child be-
longs the sovereignty.
Into the same stream we step in and step not in; we are and
are not.
Common to all is wisdom. They who speak with reason must
take their stand upon that which is common to all, as firmly as a
State does upon its law, and much more firmly. For all human
laws are fed by the one Divine law; it prevaileth as far as it
listeth, and sufficeth for all, and surviveth all.
## p. 7251 (#31) ############################################
HERACLITUS
7251
Even they that sleep are laborers and co-workers in all that
is done in the world.
Though the Word is universal, most men live as if each had a
wisdom of his own.
We must not act and speak as if we were asleep.
When we
are awake we have one common world; but when we are asleep
each turns aside to a world of his own.
A foolish man bears the same relation to a divinity as a child
to a man.
The people must fight for its law as for a wall.
Those that fall in war, gods and men honor.
It is not better that what men desire should befall them: for
it is disease that causes health; sweet, bitter; evil, good; hunger,
satisfaction; fatigue, rest.
It is hard to fight with passion; for what it desires to happen,
it buys with life.
One man to me is ten thousand, if he be the best. For what
is their mind or sense? They follow [strolling] minstrels, and
make the mob their schoolmaster, not knowing that the evil are
many, the good few. For the best choose one thing in prefer-
ence to all, eternal glory among mortals; but the many glut
themselves like cattle. In Priene was born Bias, the son of
Teutames, whose intelligence was superior to that of all others.
It were fitting that the Ephesians should hang themselves on
reaching manhood, and leave the city to the boys; for that they
cast out Hermodorus, the worthiest man among them, saying:
"Let there be no one worthiest man among us; if there be, let
him be elsewhere and with others. "
Dogs bark at every one they do not know. A foolish man is
wont to be scared at every [new] idea.
Justice will overtake the framers and abettors of lies.
With man, character is destiny.
There remaineth for men after death that which they nei-
ther hope for nor believe. Then they desire to rise and become
guardians of the quick and the dead.
Polluted [murderers] are cleansed with blood, as if one, hav-
ing stepped into mud, should wipe himself with mud.
## p. 7252 (#32) ############################################
7252
GEORGE HERBERT
(1593-1633)
YOOX HE country clergyman whose verse made the little vicarage
at Bemerton in Wiltshire a place of pilgrimage for several
generations, was not a pious rustic, but the descendant of
an illustrious house and the favorite of a court. He came of the line
of Pembroke,- that handsome and learned swaggerer Lord Herbert
of Cherbury being his elder brother. Among his intimate friends.
were the poets Donne and Wotton, and his "best lover » Izaak Wal-
ton, who says of him that "he enjoyed his genteel humor for clothes
and courtlike company, and seldom looked
toward Cambridge (where he had a fellow-
ship) unless the King were there; and then
he never failed. " In short, "holy George
Herbert," handsome and ready-witted, full
of parts and ambition, singled out by King
James for special kindnesses, very naturally
expected and longed for that advancement
which less deserving courtiers found no dif-
ficulty in securing. But the death of the
King in 1625, followed by the death of the
young poet's powerful friends the Duke
of Richmond and the Marquis of Hamilton,
shattered his prospect of a Secretaryship.
Not long after, he took orders; partly, per-
haps, because his brilliant and persuasive mother had always wished
it, partly because no other profession becoming a gentleman was
open to a man already past thirty, with fine aptitudes but with no
special training, but surely in great part because the whole tone and
bent of his soul was not worldliness but other-worldliness. "
GEORGE HERBERT
In 1630 King Charles presented him, quite unexpectedly, with the
benefice of Bemerton near Salisbury.
"The third day after he was made rector," says Walton, "and had changed
his sword and silk clothes into a canonical habit, he returned so habited with
his friend Mr. Woodnot to Bainton; and immediately after he had seen and
saluted his wife (a kinswoman of the Earl of Danby), he said to her:- You
are now a minister's wife, and must now so far forget your father's house
as not to claim precedence of any of your parishioners; for you are to know
that a priest's wife can challenge no precedence or place but that which she
## p. 7253 (#33) ############################################
GEORGE HERBERT
7253
purchases by her obliging humility; and I am sure, places so purchased do
best become them. And let me tell you, I am so good a herald as to assure
you that this is truth. > And she was so meek a wife (though she was but
lately wed, after a three-days' courtship) as to assure him it was no vexing
news to her, and that he should see her observe it with a cheerful willingness. ”
Herbert took up his duties with an ardor that made them pleas-
In the first year of his priesthood he wrote:-
ures.
--
"I now look back upon my aspiring thoughts, and think myself more happy
than if I had attained what then I so ambitiously thirsted for; and I can
now behold the court with an impartial eye, and see plainly that it is made
up of fraud, and titles, and flattery, and many other such empty, imaginary,
painted pleasures-pleasures that are so empty as not to satisfy when they
are enjoyed. "
Nor were good Mr. Herbert's grapes really sour. For there was
that in his nature which made asceticism welcome, though his self-
abasement was not the less sincere because it was pleasurable. In-
deed, the chief attribute of his poetry is its quaint sincerity, often
expressed with the utmost artificiality. With scarcely an exception,
it is all of a religious character, frequently tinged with the ascetic's
ever-present sense of his shortcomings. 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.
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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?
