HERDER. 103 



trace the influence of every earlier philosopher from 

 Aristotle down, and recognize the problems which 

 have faced every later one. 



Lessing's (i 729-1 781) 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 (i 744-1 803) 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^ ^s shown by 

 Barenbach, who has made a special study of this 

 side of his philosophy in his Herder ah Vorgmiger 

 DarwinSj 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. 



