re seeking. It was a new one in which the sober
fruits of rationalism should find place. Still, for the moment, as we
have seen, the air was full of the cry, 'back to the State by divine
right, back to the Church, back to the Middle Age, back to the beauty of
classical antiquity.' The poetry, the romance, the artistic criticism of
this movement set themselves free at a stroke from theological bondage
and from the externality of conventional ethics. It shook off the dust
of the doctrinaires. It ridiculed the petty utilitarianism which had
been the vogue. It had such an horizon as men had never dreamed before.
It owed that horizon to the rationalism it despised. From its new
elevation it surveyed all the great elements of the life of man. It saw
morals and religion, language and society, along with art and itself, as
the free and unconscious product through the ages, of the vitality of
the human spirit. It must be said that it neither solved nor put away
the ancient questions. Especially through its one-sided aestheticism it
veiled that element of dualism in the world which Kant clearly saw, and
we now see again, after a century which has sometimes leaned to easy
pantheism. However, it led to a study of the human soul and of all its
activities, which came closer to living nature than anything which the
world had yet seen.

To this group of aesthetic idealists belong, not to mention lesser names,
Lessing and Hamann and Winckelmann, but above all Herder and Goethe.
Herder was surely the finest spirit among the elder contemporaries of
Goethe. Bitterly hostile to the rationalists, he had been moved by
Rousseau to enthusiasm for the free creative life of the human spirit.
With Lessing he felt the worth of every art in and for itself, and the
greatness of life in its own fulfilment. He sets out from the analysis
of the poetic and artistic powers, the appreciation of which seemed to
him to be the key to the understanding of the spiritual world. Then
first he approaches the analysis of the ethical and religious feeling.
All the knowledge and insight thus gained he gathers together into a
history of the spiritual life of mankind. This life of the human spirit
comes forth everywhere from nature, is bound to nature. It constitutes
one whole with a nature which the devout soul calls God, and apprehends
within itself as the secret of all that it is and does. Even in the
period in which he had become passionately Christian, Herder never