HERDER. 103 



trace the influence of every earlier philosopher from 

 Aristotle down, and recognize the problems which 

 have faced every later one. 



LESSING'S (1729-1781) views of Cosmology in- 

 cluded the doctrine of a law of development which 

 embraced all Nature, and led him also to the idea 

 of a gradated scale of organisms. 



JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER (1744-1803) was a 

 student of Kant in Konigsberg between 1762 and 

 1764. We have seen that Kant's earliest contribu- 

 tion to the Evolution theory was published in 1755, 

 so that it is probable that Herder came under the 

 influence of Kant's earlier views. As shown by 

 Barenbach, who has made a special study of this 

 side of his philosophy in his Herder als Vorganger 

 Darwin s. Herder was less cautious than his 

 master, and appears almost as a literal prophet of 

 the modern natural philosophy. In a general way 

 he upholds the doctrine of the transformation of 

 the lower and higher forms of life, of a continuous 

 transformation from lower to higher types, and of 

 the law of Perfectibility. " Every combination of 

 force and form," he says, "is neither stability nor 

 retrogression, but progress. Take off the outer 

 shell and there is no death in Nature. Every dis- 

 turbance marks the transfer to a higher type." In 

 his Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit, published in 

 Tubingen in 1806, we find the following passage: 



"A certain unity of type pervades all the different forms of 

 life, like a main type which can display the widest variations. 



