50 



INTRODUCTION. 



27. 

 Lotze's re- 

 lation to 

 Herder's 

 ' Ideen.' 



further knowledge of the worth of the object which is 

 accomplished, of the result which is gained by the calcu- 

 lation. It is one thing to be able to trace the mechanical 

 conditions upon which the accuracy of a clock depends ; 

 it is another to mark the hour which the clock strikes, 

 and to note the time which it measures out to us for our 

 work. Curiosity will lead a child to pry into the former ; 

 but the latter depends on our appreciation of the objects 

 of life and the seriousness of our duties. 



When Lotze undertook to write the ' Microcosmus,' he 

 referred to two great works of a kindred tendency. Both 

 attempted, yet in very different ways, to give a compre- 

 hensive view of a large field of scattered phenomena, to 

 take in at a glance the entire scheme of a great world of 

 facts. The earlier of the two belonged to the last century 

 and was concerned with history, with the uniting bond of 

 all human development. For this Herder, in his ' Ideen 

 zur Philosophic der Geschichte der Menschheit,' had, if not 

 invented, yet endowed the term Humanity with a specific 

 pregnancy, meaning by it the unity of all human interests 

 in their social and historical development an idea which 

 since Leibniz has governed German literature.'^ The other 



See, inter alia, the closing para- 

 graph of the first volume of the 

 'System der Philosophic ' (1st ed., 

 Leipzig, 1874). I cannot omit to 

 notice here the extraordinary and 

 misleading misprint in Erdmann's 

 quotation of this passage : see his 

 valuable ' Geschichte der Philoso- 

 phie' (3d ed., Berlin, 1878, vol. ii. p. 

 861), where instead of berechnen, to 

 calculate, we read bezcichnen, to 

 designate ! 



1 The history of this idea has 

 been written by Hettner in the 



last two volumes of his ' Literatur- 

 geschichte des 18ten Jahrhunderts.' 

 I quote from the 2d edition, 

 Braunschweig, 1872. Herder had 

 inherited the spirit of Leibniz (see, 

 inter alia, the concluding chapter 

 of my essay on Leibniz, in Black- 

 wood's Philosophical Classics, Edin- 

 burgh, 1884). Herder formed a 

 kind of centre of thought, inas- 

 much as he gathered up in his own 

 mind and writings the influences of 

 Leibniz, Rousseau, and the Eng- 

 lish writers of the eighteenth cen- 



