use of the facet 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 ser- vices 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 natural- ness 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 decep- tion, 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 toa speculative basis for his religious beliefs. (5) Herder’s masterpiece, the deen, 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 im 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 tle operations of physi- cal nature. Herder defines human history as ‘‘a pure natural his- tory of human powers, actions, and propensities, modified by time and place.” The Jdeen shows us that Herder is an evolutionist after the manner of Leibnitz, and not after that of more modern evolutionists.[1] The lower forms of life prefigure man in unequal degrecs 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 varicties 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 Mr Spencer and Mr Darwin. Thus in a passage in book xv. chap. ii., which unmistakably fore- shadows Mr 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 thonsands of years remains in the great harmonious order. Wild animals and tame, carnivorous and gra- minivorous, 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 Mr Spencer's ilea 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.[2] Herder is more successful in tracing the early developments of particular peoples than in constructing a scientific theory of evolution. Here he may Le said to have laid the foundations of the science of primitive cul- ture 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. His sympathy with the one and his antipathy to the other were intimately connected with the essential character of his mind, which was more synthetic than analytic, regarded things in their concrete surroundings rather than in abstract isolation. It was but one step more to the man who had learnt to vicw poetry, art, language, &c., in their connexion with social and physical surroundings, and to conceive of hUman history in its relation to physical events, to bring together the great aggre- gates of material and spiritual phenomena under onc total concep- tion of a single substance or God. Herder’s Spinozism, which is set forth in his little work, Vom Erkenaen und Empfindung der menschlichen Scele, 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, 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 reflexion to the unity of mind, and so to develop the post-Kantian line of speculation. Herder was much attracted by Schelling’s writings, but appears to have disliked Hegelianism because of the atheism it seemed to him to involve. In the Calli- gone, a work directed against Kant’s Critic of Judgment, 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 «s- thetics is but the reflexion of his practical opposition to the form- idolatry of the Weimar poets.
The most valuable original sources of information on Herder, next to his own works (of which a new edition, critically revised by B. Suphan, is just appearing), are the Erinnerungen aus dem Leben J. G. von Herder, by Herder's wife; J. G. ton Herder’s Lebensbild, by his son Emil; and his letters, edited by Dtintzer and Herder’s grandson. The general reader will find a suffieient account of Herder in a number of recent biographical works. Among these the fullest are Ch. Joret’s Herder et la Renaissance. Littéraire en Allemagne (which unfortunately does not deal with the latter part of his life), and R. Haym’s Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken, The account of Herder in Hettner's Literaturgeschichte is very full and interesting.
HEREFORD, an inland English county on the south Welsh border, is bounded on the N. by Salop, S. by Monmouthshire and Gloucestershire, E. by Worcestershire, and W. by Radnorshire and Brecknockshire. Its circular shape is indented by spurs of adjacent counties, and its outlying parts have by an Act of William IV. 7 and 8 been incorporated with the counties in which they are situated. Its greatest length from Ludford by Ludlow to the Doward Hills, near Monmouth, is 38 miles; its greatest breadth from Cradley to Clifford, near Hay, 35. Its area according to the census of 1871 is 532,898 statute acres, or &32 square miles. It is divided into 11 hundreds and 221 parishes, and is a bishop’s see, of which the cathedral city is the centre of the county.
The soil is generally marl and clay, but in various parts contains calcareous earth in mixed proportions. Westward the soil is tenacious and retentive of water ; on the east it is a stiff and often reddish clay. In the south is found a light sandy loam. The subsoil is mostly limestone, in some parts the Old Red Sandstone, and a species of red and white veined marble. Where the soil does not rest on lime- stone, it is sometimes a silicious gravel, or contains fuller’s earth and yellow ochres. Limestone, quarried at Aymestry and Nash to the north-west of the county, and at Ledbury, Woolhope, and elsewhere, is successfully applied as a manure for arable land and pasture. For the physical history of the county reference must be made to Murchi- son’s Stluria, or Symonds’s Ltecords of the Rocks, where the upheaval and denudation in the Woolhope valley and over the central dome of Haughwood and similar questions are discussed.
- ↑ See article Evolution, vol. viii. pp. 760, 761.
- ↑ Herder s relation to modern evolutionists is dealt with in F. von Birenbach’s Herder als Voryinger Darwins.
