Herder's great work, however,—which, side by side with Lessing's Education of the Human Race, and with Kant's Idea for a Universal History, helped to constitute that conception of history, as philosophy in concrete form, which appears in Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel,—was the Ideas for a Philosophy of History. It is the pendant and contrast to Kant's three Criticisms, with which it is nearly contemporaneous (1784-91). Even in history Kant emphasises the work of intelligence, of reason: and puts the intelligently-organised state—if possible, the world-commonwealth, when war shall be transformed into merely stimulating competition,—as the final triumph of the reason. To Herder, while on the one hand the nature-basis is all-essential, and must form the foundation of any genetic explanation of spiritual phenomena, the ideal of humanity presents itself rather as a free development of the many-sided individual—a development tempered by the association of the family and the claims of friendship. In Kant's view of civilisation, natural reason by its indwelling presuppositions works out the end of culture: Herder, on the contrary, allows himself to introduce—but only in and from the dim background—a supernatural aid to actualise the germs of rationality latent in man's nature. Yet, though at the first step into history the Godhead appears, and a deified humanity looms ahead as the consummation of the process of evolution, the development between these two extreme poles is homogeneous and indeed one. The same law governs it throughout:
'Ethics is only a higher physics of the mind.' Man is from the first endowed with tendencies which, through the medium of society and tradition, carry him on to the double end, so hard to combine, of 'humanity and happiness,' 'humanity and religion.' But, for this training of the spirit he is prepared by a special natural endowment of the body: and Herder can go so far as to say that 'in order to delineate the duties of man, we need only delineate his form.' Developing under the influence of cosmic and geographical conditions, and formed of the same protoplasm and on the same type as other animals, man possesses an unique organisation, a definitely proportioned mechanism, which is his distinctive and permanent specific character. General identity of plan and condition prevails for man and animals; but Herder keeps back from the Darwinian inference which interprets the graduated diversity of type as indicating that man is the phase reached pro tempore in the gradual slide along which the continuous change of environment carries the unstable types which earlier environments have helped to form. For Herder's conception of nature there are fixed differences beyond which research cannot go; and we shall see that both Schelling and Hegel accept this reservation.
Herder, finally, struck a blow in the war that was waged after Lessing's death between the friends and foes of Spinozism. His little book God (1787) is a vindication v of Spinoza against Jacobi's attack. Antiquarian accuracy it can lay no claim to: the picture of Spinozism, one-sided at the best, is further vitiated by an interpretation of the doctrine which leavens it to indistinctness with the ideas of Leibniz and Shaftesbury. It was a grand—but it was also an audacious—vision of Spinozism which found it not inconsistent with a fundamental theism on one side and with the poetry of nature on the other. Yet Herder had the merit of being perhaps the first to pierce the hard logical shell of rationalism under which Spinoza had lain hidden, and to reveal the mystic passion for God which so quaintly called itself amor erga rem infinitam et aeternam. 'Spinoza,' says Herder, 'was an enthusiast for the being of God,' Even where he translates Spinoza's terms into ample equivalents, he does service by teaching men that the vapid inanities they associate with terms like substance, mode, cause, are inadequate to interpret the intensity of meaning they had for the philosopher. To remove the seals which rendered both Leibniz and Spinoza a mystery for the world was to prepare the way for Schelling and Hegel[2].
It is under the aegis of Spinoza and Leibniz that Schelling begins his first characteristic work,—the Ideas towards a philosophy of Nature. In these thinkers he found first proclaimed as the fundamental standpoint of philosophy the unity of the finite and the infinite, of the real and the ideal, of the absolutely active and the absolutely passive. They differed indeed in this, that whereas this unity is pre-supposed by Spinoza as infinite and absolute substance, of which all separate existence, body or mind, is only a modus, it is taken by Leibniz as the universal characteristic of every individual being. Every monad—and the human soul is the typical monad—is at once finite and infinite, real and ideal, active and passive. But—whether as underlying substance, or as unity of reality—both hold the cardinal doctrine that the absolute (the 'Object' of philosophy) is the unity and unification—the identity—of what outside it appears as two sides or orders of being, the real and the ideal. To philosophise, therefore—or to see things in the absolute—is (not as Hegel's malicious joke puts it[3], to look at them 'in the night when all cows are dark,'—but) to see them in the intense light that proceeds from the identity of the Spirit within us with the Nature without us.
Fichte had caught hold of this standpoint. He had seen that the original antithesis which confronts us, and the conjunction (synthesis) of its members, presupposed a still more fundamental and indeed absolute thesis,—an aboriginal and active unity. That antithesis is the opposition of ego and not-ego; that synthesis is every act of knowledge and will, by which each of these powers is in turn limited by the other. Such a synthesis (volition or cognition) would be impossible unless on the fundamental thesis (or hypothesis) of a unity, or identity, which gives rise to the antithesis and has the power of overcoming it. Such an original unity is what he calls the absolute Ego. I am what I know and will, and what I know and will is Me. Such is the equation (briefly written, I = I) which identifies subject and object (of knowledge and will). But the associations clinging to the terms Fichte used gave this thought a one-sided direction. The 'I' is opposed to the 'Thee,' and the 'Them,' and the 'It.' The 'thing'—or non-ego—is depreciated as compared with the thinker and willer. It is postulated ad majorem gloriam of the Ego: in order that I may work out the full fruition of my being. It is what I ought to make out of it. It is nothing but what it will be—or will be if I do what I ought to do. The identity of the two sides therefore is left as 'the object of an endless task, an absolute imperative.' The Absolute is not yet:—it is only the forecast of a postulated result.
'If this be what Fichte teaches, and be called subjective idealism, then for Schelling the first thing is to quit the house of bondage. Let us leave out of view the Ego, with its misleading associations, and begin with the two fields which are known to us, the fields of Nature and Spirit. Nature—not Matter—is the one side: Mind or Spirit the other. Each of them furnishes the object of one branch of philosophy—a philosophy of Nature, on one hand, and a transcendental idealism on the other. The former is new, and more especially Schelling's own proper continuation of Kant: the other partly a continuation of Fichte's work. But as they are both philosophy, they must coincide or meet. The whole philosophy may therefore call itself a philosophy of Identity; but, for the while, it will present itself under the two aspects of a philosophy of Nature, conceived as the blind and unconscious, a philosophy of Mind and history, as the free and conscious product of intelligence.[4]
[1] He held posts of large general superintendence over church and school affairs at Weimar.
[2] See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 420.
[3] Hegel, Werke, ii. 13.