532 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



great, and would have been greater had he not lived at 

 a time when the study of the human mind by the purely 

 introspective or speculative methods had absorbed all 

 philosophical interest in England and Germany. His 

 opposition to the (abstract) subjective philosophy of 

 Kant and Fichte made him unpopular; he was only 

 half understood at the time ; and only towards the end 

 of our century have his ideas been recognised as con- 

 taining the clear conception of psycho-physics on the 

 large scale i.e., of the natural history of humanity, the 

 genesis and evolution of the objective mind. 



Herder was a pupil of Kant during his pre-critical 

 period. He was still more influenced by great 

 naturalists like Haller, Buffon, Camper, Sommering, 

 Forster, and Blumenbach, who through physiology, com- 

 parative anatomy, and ethnology, attempted to bring the 

 study of the human race and its mental development into 

 connection with that of the brute creation, of the 

 surrounding plant-life, of the characteristics of climate 

 and soil, and of the great natural features of sky and 

 landscape. He did not believe that we could study 

 the great forces of nature and mind from inside or in 

 the abstract he desired to follow Haller 's physiology, to 

 complete and continue it into psychology. Irritability, 1 



characteristically maintained that 

 method is frequently only a con- 

 vention, and he was deficient in 

 critical acumen. The German mind 

 had to go through the severe dis- 

 cipline of the school of mathemati- 

 cal and critical thought, and to 

 amass an enormous volume of ex- 

 perimental and historical know- 

 ledge, before the brilliant conception 

 of Herder in his great work ' Ideen 



zur Geschichte der Menschheit ' (4 

 pts., 1784-87) could be partially re- 

 alised by A. von Humboldt in his 

 'Kosmos' (1841-59), and by Lotze 

 in his ' Microcosmus ' (1856-64). 

 See especially the preface to the 

 latter. 



1 See above, p. 471, on a similar 

 development of Haller's teaching 

 through Cabanis in France some- 

 what later in time. 



