534 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



43. parts," he says. 1 " my book shows that one cannot as 



His 'History r . 



of Mankind/ y e t wr ite a philosophy of human history, but that per- 

 haps one may write it at the end of our century or 

 of our chiliad." 



And indeed the whole of our own century has been 

 busy in carrying out this prophetic programme of 

 Herder's, consciously as planned by hirn in Germany 

 unconsciously and independently in other countries. As 

 a counterpart to the introspective labours of Kant and 

 their followers, a large array of naturalists, historians, 

 philologists, and ethnologists have in the spirit of Herder 

 ransacked every corner of the globe and every monument 

 of history with the distinct object of tracing there the 

 physical basis and the workings of that inner and hidden 

 principle which we call the human mind. In doing this, 

 they or their numerous followers, who belonged to a 

 generation which knew not Herder, have strayed far away 

 from the common starting-point, and have frequently lost 

 themselves in the bewildering details of special research. 

 Above all, in the country to which Herder belonged, a 



44 



separation separation set ill early in the century between what have 



of natural 



and mental been termed the natural and the mental sciences. The 



sciences. 



former came more and more under the sway of the 

 mathematical spirit, which, as I showed in an earlier 

 chapter, turned the eyes of its votaries away from their 

 own national scientific literature to that of their neigh- 

 bours first to France, latterly to England. The mental 

 sciences, on the other hand, history, philology, the social 

 sciences, came under the influence of exactly those phil- 

 osophical ideas which Herder never understood nor assimi- 



1 See the preface to the first part of the 'Ideen,' 1784. 



