an a suggestion for a new synthesis, but
it was opportune and arresting.

Herder meanwhile had been thinking, and in 1784 he gave the German world
his survey of man's career--Ideas of the Philosophy of the History of
Humanity. In this famous work, in which we can mark the influence of
French thinkers, especially Montesquieu, as well as of Leibnitz, he
attempted, though on very different lines, the same task which Turgot
and Condorcet planned, a universal history of civilisation.

The Deity designed the world but never interferes in its process,
either in the physical cosmos or in human history. Human history itself,
civilisation, is a purely natural phenomenon. Events are strictly
enchained; continuity is unbroken; what happened at any given time could
have happened only then, and nothing else could have happened.
Herder's rigid determinism not only excludes Voltaire's chance but also
suppresses the free play of man's intelligent will. Man cannot guide his
own destinies; his actions and fortunes are determined by the nature
of things, his physical organisation and physical environment. The
fact that God exists in inactive ease hardly affects the fatalistic
complexion of this philosophy; but it is perhaps a mitigation that the
world was made for man; humanity is its final cause.

The variety of the phases of civilisation that have appeared on earth
is due to the fact that the possible manifestations of human nature are
very numerous and that they must all be realised. The lower forms are
those in which the best, which means the most human, faculties of our
nature are undeveloped. The highest has not yet been realised. "The
flower of humanity, captive still in its germ, will blossom out one
day into the true form of man like unto God, in a state of which no
terrestrial man can imagine the greatness and the majesty." [Footnote:
Ideen, v. 5.]

Herder is not a systematic thinker--indeed his work abounds in
contradictions--and he has not made it clear how far this full epiphany
results from the experiences of mankind in preceding phases. He believes
that life is an education for humanity (he has taken the phrase of
Lessing), that good progressively develops, that reason and justice
become more powerful. This is a doctrine of Progress, but he distinctly
opposes the hypothesis of a final and unique state of perfection as the
goal of history, which would imply that earlier generations exist for
the sake of the later and suff