Another disciple of Baumgarten is J. G. Herder, who had an unbounded admiration for the old Berlin master, whom he calls "the Aristotle of his day," and defends him warmly against those who think fit to describe him as a "stupid and obtuse syllogizer" (1769). On the other hand he had slight esteem for subsequent Æsthetic, for example Meier's work, which he stigmatized accurately enough as "in part a re-mastication of Logic, in part a patchwork of metaphorical terms, comparisons and examples." "O Æsthetic!" he cries with emphasis, "O Æsthetic! the most fertile, the most beautiful and by far the most novel of all abstract sciences, in what cavern of the Muses is sleeping the youth of my philosophic nation destined to bring thee to perfection?"[57] He denied Baumgarten's claim to have established an Ars pulchre cogitandi instead of limiting himself to a simple Scientia de pulchro et pulchris philosophice cogitans, and ridiculed the scruple which held Æsthetic to be unworthy of the dignity of Philosophy.[58] To compensate for this, however, he accepted the fundamental definition cf poetry as oratio sensitiva perfecta: gem of definitions (says he), the best that has ever been invented, that penetrates to the heart of the matter, touches the true poetic principles and opens the most extended view over the entire philosophy of the beautiful, "coupling poetry with her sisters, the fine arts."[59] Like Cesarotti the Italian, but with much less vivacity and brilliance, Herder the German had studied primitive poetry, Ossian and the songs of ancient peoples, Shakespeare (1773), popular love-songs (1778), the spirit of Hebrew poetry (1782), and oriental poetry; these studies powerfully impressed upon his mind the sensitive nature of poetry. His friend Hamann (1762) had written these memorable words, which read like an extract from one of Vico's aphorisms: "Poetry is the mother-tongue of mankind: in the same way that the garden is older than the ploughed field, painting than writing, song than declamation, barter than trade. The repose of our most ancient progenitors was a slumber deeper than ours; their motion a tumultuous dance. They spent seven days in the silence of thought or of stupor; and opened their mouths to pronounce winged words. Their speech was sensation and passion, and they understood nothing but images. Of images is composed all the treasure of human knowledge and felicity."[60] Although Herder, who knew and admired Vico,[61] does not mention him by name when treating of language and poetry, one might suppose him to be influenced by the great Neapolitan at least in the final consolidation of his theories; but, on the contrary, the authors whom he chiefly quotes in this connexion are Du Bos, Goguet and Condillac, and observes "the first beginnings of human speech in tone, gesture, expression of sensations and thoughts by means of images and signs, can only have been a kind of crude poetry, and so it is among every savage nation in the world." Not a speech with punctuation and a sense of syllable, like ours, learning as we do to read and write, but an unsyllabled melody which gave birth to the primitive epic. "Natural man depicts what he sees and as he sees it, alive, powerful, monstrous; in order or disorder, as he sees and hears, so he reproduces. Not alone did barbarous tongues thus arrange their images, but Greek and Latin do the same. As the senses offered material, so the poets utilized it; especially in Homer we see how closely nature is followed in images which glow and fade perpetually and inimitably. He describes things and events line by line, scene by scene; and, in the same way, he paints men in their very bodies, actually as they speak and move." Later we distinguish epic from what we call history; because the former "not only describes what has happened but describes the event in its entirety, showing how it occurred in the only possible way, having regard to surrounding circumstance of body and spirit": this is the reason of the more philosophical character of poetry. As for pleasure, no doubt we do find poetry pleasant; but the idea that the poet's motive is merely to excite pleasure cannot be condemned too strongly. "Homer's gods were as essential and indispensable to the poet's world as the forces of motion are to the world of matter. Without the deliberations and activities of Olympus, none of the necessary events which happen on this earth could take place. Homer's magic island in the western sea belongs to the map of his hero's wanderings by the same necessity which placed it on the map of the world: it was necessary to the plan of his poem. It is the same with the severe Dante and his circles of Hell and Heaven." Art is formative: she disciplines, orders and governs the imagination and every faculty of man: not only did she generate history, "but, earlier yet, she created gods and heroes and purified the uncouth imaginations and fables of peoples with their Titans, monsters and Gorgons, reducing to limit and law the riotous imagination of ignorant men which knows no bounds or rule."[62]
Notwithstanding these intuitions, so like those of Vico early in the same century, Herder as a philosopher is inferior to his Italian predecessor, and in point of fact does not rise superior to Baumgarten. By application of Leibniz' law of continuity, he too arrived at the opinion that the pleasing, the true, the beautiful and the good are degrees of one single activity. For instance, sensible pleasure" is a participation in the true and the good, so far as the senses may comprehend them; the feeling of pleasure and pain is no other than the feeling of the true and the good, that is to say, the consciousness that the aim of our organism, the conservation of our well-being and the avoidance of our hurt, has been attained."[63] Fine arts and letters are all instructive (bildend): hence the terms humaniora, the Greek καλόν, the Latin pulchrum, the gentle arts of days of chivalry, les belles lettres et les beaux arts of the French. A group of them (gymnastic, dance, etc.) educates the body; a second group (painting, plastic, music) educates the nobler senses of man, the eye, the ear, the hand and tongue; a third (poetry) touches the intellect, the imagination and the reason: a fourth group governs human tendencies and inclinations.[64] Herder disapproved of the facile theorists of art who began straight away with a definition of beauty, a complex and involved concept. He held that the theory of fine arts should be subdivided into three theories, each to be built up from the foundations, the theory of sight, of hearing and of touch, that is to say of painting, music and sculpture, i.e. into æsthetical Optics, æsthetical Acoustics and æsthetical Physiology. "Fairly well elaborated in the psychological and subjective aspects, Æsthetic is sadly undeveloped in all that belongs to the object and to the sensation of beauty, without which there can never be a fertile theory of the Beautiful capable of influencing all the arts."[65] Taste is not "a fundamental faculty of the soul but a habitual application of our judgement (intellectual judgement) to objects of beauty"; an acquired facility of the intellect (of which Herder outlines the genesis).[66] The poet is poet not only in his imagination but in his intellect. In 1782 he writes: "The barbarous name Æsthetic of recent invention indicates nothing beyond a section of Logic: that which we call taste is neither more nor less than a quick and rapid judgement which does not exclude truth and profundity, but rather presupposes and promotes them. All didactic poetry is nothing more than philosophy rendered sensible: the fable as exposition of a general doctrine is truth in act, in activity.... When expounded and applied to human affairs, Philosophy is not only a fine art in herself (schöne Wissenschaft,) but the mother of Beauty: it is only through her that Rhetoric and Poetry can ever be educational, useful, or in the truest sense pleasant."[67]
Philosophy of language.
Herder and Hamann deserve our gratitude for having brought a current of fresh air into the study of the philosophy of language. The lead given by the Port-Royal authors had been followed since the beginning of the century by many writers of logical or general grammars. According to the French Encyclopædia, "La grammaire générale est la science raisonnée des principes immuables et généraux de la parole prononcée ou écrite dans toutes les langues,"[68] and d'Alembert spoke of grammarians of invention and grammarians of memory, assigning to the former the duty of studying the metaphysics of grammar.[69] General grammars had been written by Du Marsais, De Beauzée, and Condillac in France; Harris in England; and many others.[70] But what was the relation between general grammar and particular grammars? If logic be one, how comes it that languages are many? Is the variety of tongues but a deviation on their part from one single model? And, if there be no such deviation or error, what is the explanation of the fact? What is language, and how was it born? If language be external to thought, how can thought exist if not in language? "Si les hommes," says Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "ont eu besoin de la parole pour apprendre à penser, ils ont eu bien plus besoin encore de savoir penser pour trouver l'art de la parole"; appalled at the difficulty, he declares his conviction "de l'impossibilité presque démontrée que les langues aient pu naître et s'établir par des moyens purement humains."[71] Such questions became fashionable; books on the origin and formation of language were written by de Brosses (1765) and Court de Gébelin (1776) in France, by Monboddo (1774) in England, Süssmilch (1766) and Tiedemann in Germany, and Cesarotti (1785) in Italy, and by others who had some slight acquaintance with Vico, but profited little by it.[72] None of the above-named writers was able to free himself of the notion that speech was either natural and mechanical, or else a symbol attached to thought: whereas in fact it was impossible to solve the difficulties under which they were labouring except by dropping the notion of a sign or symbol and attaining the conception of the active and expressive imagination, verbal imagination, language as the expression not of intellect but of intuition. An approach towards this explanation was made by Herder in a brilliant and imaginative thesis in 1770 upon this subject of the origin of language, chosen for discussion by the Berlin Academy. In it he says that language is the reflexion or consciousness (Besonnenheit) of man. "Man shows reflexion when he puts forth freely such force of mind as enables him to make selection from amongst the crowd of sensations by which he is assailed: from the ocean of the senses, so to speak, to select a single wave and consciously to watch it. He shows reflexion when, amidst the thronging chaos of images which pass before him as in a dream, he can in a waking moment collect himself and fasten his attention upon a single image, examine it calmly and clearly, and separate it from its neighbours. Once again, man shows reflexion when he is able not merely to grasp vividly and clearly all the properties of an image, but also to recognize one or more of its distinctive properties." The language of man "does not depend on the organization of the mouth, for even he who is dumb from birth has, if he reflects, a language; it is not a cry of the senses, since it resides in a reflective creature, not in a breathing machine; it is not an affair of imitation, since imitation of nature is a means, and we are here trying to explain the end: much less is it an arbitrary convention; a savage in the depths of the forest would have had to create a language for himself even though he never used it. Language is an understanding of the soul with herself, necessary just in so far as man is man."[73] Here language begins to show itself no longer as purely mechanical or as something derived from arbitrary choice and invention, but as a creative activity and a primary affirmation of the activity of the human mind. Herder's essay may not state such a view unequivocally, but it points forward to such a conclusion in a striking way for which its author has not received the credit he deserves. Hamann, in reviewing his friend's theories, agreed with him in denying the origin of language by invention or arbitrary choice; while dwelling also on the liberty of man, he regarded language as something which man could only have learned by means of a mystical communicatio idiomatum from God.[74] That, too, was one way of recognizing that the mystery of language is not to be solved except by placing it in the forefront of the problem of the spirit.
[1] Vico, Opere, ed. cit. iv. p. 305.
[2] Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, 1793-1797, Letter 59; Goethe, Italien. Reise, Mar. 5, 1787.
[3] Letters from Wolf to Cesarotti, June 5, 1802; in Cesarotti, Opere, vol. xxxviii. pp. 108-112; cf. ibid. pp. 43-44, and vol. xxxvii. pp. 281, 284, 324; cf. on the question of the relations between Wolf and Vico, Croce, Bibliografia vichiana, pp. 51, 56-58, and Supplem. pp. 12-14.
[4] Letter in French to Mme. Ferrant (1719), and to the Marquis Maffei in Prose e poesie, vol. ii. (1756), pp. lxxxv.-civ., cviii.-cix.
[5] Prose e poesie, vol. i., 1739, pref.