THE EVOLUTION IDEA 153 



Lessing (1729-1781), Herder (1744-1803) 



Lessing's views of cosmology included the 

 doctrine of a law of development w^hich embraced 

 all Nature and which led him also to the idea of 

 a graduated scale of organisms. 



Johann Gottfried Herder was a student of 

 Kant in Konigsberg between 1762 and 1764. We 

 have seen that Kant's earliest contribution to 

 the idea of Evolution was pubhshed 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 V organ- 

 ger 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 Herder 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 retro- 

 gression, but progress. Take off the outer shell 

 and there is no death in Nature. Every distur- 

 bance marks the transfer to a higher type." In 

 his Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit, pub- 

 lished in Tubingen in 1806, we find the following 

 passage : 



