valid for all peoples and all times. He was one of the first to bring to
light the characteristic excellences of Gothic art. Beyond this, he
eloquently pleaded the cause of painting as a distinct art, which
Lessing in his desire to mark off the formative arts from poetry and
music had confounded with sculpture. He regarded this as the art
of the eye, while sculpture was rather the art of the organ of touch.
Painting being less real than sculpture, because lacking the third
dimension of space, and a kind of dream, admitted of much greater
freedom of treatment than this last. Herder had a genuine appreciation
for early German painters, and helped to awaken the modern
interest in Albrecht Dürer.
3. By his work on language Über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), Herder may be said to have laid the first rude foundations of the science of comparative philology and that deeper science of the ultimate nature and origin of language. It was specially directed against the supposition of a divine communication of language to man. Its main argument is that speech is a necessary outcome of that special arrangement of mental forces which distinguishes man, and more particularly from his habits of reflection. “If,” Herder says, “it is incomprehensible to others how a human mind could invent language, it is as incomprehensible to me how a human mind could be what it is without discovering language for itself.” The writer does not make that use of the fact of man’s superior organic endowments which one might expect from his general conception of the relation of the physical and the mental in human development.
4. Herder’s services in laying the foundations of a comparative science of religion and mythology are even of greater value than his somewhat crude philological speculations. In opposition to the general spirit of the 18th century he saw, by means of his historic sense, the naturalness of religion, its relation to man’s wants and impulses. Thus with respect to early religious beliefs he rejected Hume’s notion that religion sprang out of the fears of primitive men, in favour of the theory that it represents the first attempts of our species to explain phenomena. He thus intimately associated religion with mythology and primitive poetry. As to later forms of religion, he appears to have held that they owe their vitality to their embodiment of the deep-seated moral feelings of our common humanity. His high appreciation of Christianity, which contrasts with the contemptuous estimate of the contemporary rationalists, rested on a firm belief in its essential humanity, to which fact, and not to conscious deception, he attributes its success. His exposition of this religion in his sermons and writings was simply an unfolding of its moral side. In his later life, as we shall presently see, he found his way to a speculative basis for his religious beliefs.
5. Herder’s masterpiece, the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte, has the ambitious aim of explaining the whole of human development in close connexion with the nature of man’s physical environment. Man is viewed as a part of nature, and all his widely differing forms of development as strictly natural processes. It thus stands in sharp contrast to the anthropology of Kant, which opposes human development conceived as the gradual manifestation of a growing faculty of rational free will to the operations of physical nature. Herder defines human history as “a pure natural history of human powers, actions and propensities, modified by time and place.” The Ideen shows us that Herder is an evolutionist after the manner of Leibnitz, and not after that of more modern evolutionists. The lower forms of life prefigure man in unequal degrees of imperfection; they exist for his sake, but they are not regarded as representing necessary antecedent conditions of human existence. The genetic method is applied to varieties of man, not to man as a whole. It is worth noting, however, that Herder in his provokingly tentative way of thinking comes now and again very near ideas made familiar to us by Spencer and Darwin. Thus in a passage in book xv. chap, ii., which unmistakably foreshadows Darwin’s idea of a struggle for existence, we read: “Among millions of creatures whatever could preserve itself abides, and still after the lapse of thousands of years remains in the great harmonious order. Wild animals and tame, carnivorous and graminivorous, insects, birds, fishes and man are adapted to each other.” With this may be compared a passage in the Ursprung der Sprache, where there is a curious adumbration of Spencer’s idea that intelligence, as distinguished from instinct, arises from a growing complexity of action, or, to use Herder’s words, from the substitution of a more for a less contracted sphere. Herder is more successful in tracing the early developments of particular peoples than in constructing a scientific theory of evolution. Here he may be said to have laid the foundations of the science of primitive culture as a whole. His account of the first dawnings of culture, and of the ruder Oriental civilizations, is marked by genuine insight. On the other hand the development of classic culture is traced with a less skilful hand. Altogether this work is rich in suggestion to the philosophic historian and the anthropologist, though marked by much vagueness of conception and hastiness of generalization.
6. Of Herder’s properly metaphysical speculations little needs to be said. He was too much under the sway of feeling and concrete imagination to be capable of great things in abstract thought. It is generally admitted that he had no accurate knowledge either of Spinoza, whose monism he advocated, or of Kant, whose critical philosophy he so fiercely attacked. Herder’s Spinozism, which is set forth in his little work, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele (1778), is much less logically conceived than Lessing’s. It is the religious aspect of it which attracts him, the presentation in God of an object which at once satisfies the feelings and the intellect. With respect to his attacks on the critical philosophy in the Metakritik (1799), it is easy to understand how his concrete mind, ever alive to the unity of things, instinctively rebelled against that analytic separation of the mental processes which Kant attempted. However crude and hasty this critical investigation, it helped to direct philosophic reflection to the unity of mind, and so to develop the post-Kantian line of speculation. Herder was much attracted by Schelling’s early writings, but appears to have disliked Hegelianism because of the atheism it seemed to him to involve. In the Kalligone (1800), work directed against Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft, Herder argues for the close connexion of the beautiful and the good. To his mind the content of art, which he conceived as human feeling and human life in its completeness, was much more valuable than the form, and so he was naturally led to emphasize the moral element in art. Thus his theoretic opposition to the Kantian aesthetics is but the reflection of his practical opposition to the form-idolatry of the Weimar poets. (J. S.)
Bibliography.—An edition of Herder’s Sämtliche Werke in 45 vols. was published after his death by his widow (1805–1820); a second in 60 vols. followed in 1827–1830; a third in 40 vols. in 1852–1854. There is also an edition by H. Düntzer (24 vols., 1869–1879). But these have all been superseded by the monumental critical edition by B. Suphan (32 vols., 1877 sqq.). Of the many “selected works,” mention may be made of those by B. Suphan (4 vols., 1884–1887); by H. Lambel, H. Meyer and E. Kühnemann in Kürschner’s Deutsche Nationalliteratur (10 vols., 1885–1894). For Herder’s correspondence, see Aus Herders Nachlass (3 vols., 1856–1857), Herders Reise nach Italien (1859), Von und an Herder: Ungedruckte Briefe (3 vols., 1861–1862)—all three works edited by H. Düntzer and F. G. von Herder. Herder’s Briefwechsel mit Nicolai and his Briefe an Hamann have been edited by O. Hoffmann (1887 and 1889). For biography and criticism, see Erinnerungen aus dem Leben Herders, by his wife, edited by J. G. Müller (2 vols., 1820); J. G. von Herders Lebensbild (with his correspondence), by his son, E. G. von Herder (6 vols., 1846); C. Joret, Herder et la renaissance littéraire en Allemagne au XVIII e siècle (1875); F. von Bärenbach, Herder als Vorgänger Darwins (1877); R. Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken (2 vols., 1880–1885); H. Nevinson, A Sketch of Herder and his Times (1884); M. Kronenberg, Herders Philosophie nach ihrem Entwicklungsgang (1889); E. Kühnemann, Herders Leben (1895); R. Bürkner, Herder, sein Leben und Wirken (1904).
HEREDIA, JOSÉ MARIA DE (1842–1905), French poet, the
modern master of the French sonnet, was born at Fortuna
Cafeyere, near Santiago de Cuba, on the 22nd of November 1842,
being in blood part Spanish Creole and part French. At the
age of eight he came from the West Indies to France, returning
thence to Havana at seventeen, and finally making France his
home not long afterwards. He received his classical education
with the priests of Saint Vincent at Senlis, and after a visit to
Havana he studied at the École des Chartes at Paris. In the
later ’sixties, with François Coppée, Sully-Prudhomme, Paul
Verlaine and others less distinguished, he made one of the band
of poets who gathered round Leconte de Lisle, and received the
name of Parnassiens. To this new school, form—the technical
side of their art—was of supreme importance, and, in reaction
against the influence of Musset, they rigorously repressed in their
work the expression of personal feeling and emotion. “True
poetry,” said M. de Heredia in his discourse on entering the
Academy—“true poetry dwells in nature and in humanity,
which are eternal, and not in the heart of the creature of a day,
however great.” M. de Heredia’s place in the movement was
soon assured. He wrote very little, and published even less,
but his sonnets circulated in MS., and gave him a reputation
before they appeared in 1893, together with a few longer poems,
as a volume, under the title of Les Trophées. He was elected
to the Academy on the 22nd of February 1894, in the place of
Louis de Mazade-Percin the publicist. Few purely literary
men can have entered the Academy with credentials so small in
quantity. A small volume of verse—a translation, with introduction,
of Diaz del Castillo’s History of the Conquest of New
Spain (1878–1881)—a translation of the life of the nun Alferez
(1894), de Quincey’s “Spanish Military Nun”—and one or two
short pieces of occasional verse, and an introduction or so—this
is but small literary baggage, to use the French expression.
But the sonnets are of their kind among the most superb in
modern literature. “A Légende des siècles in sonnets” M.
François Coppée called them. Each presents a picture, striking,
brilliant, drawn with unfaltering hand—the picture of some
