was
able to attain to a scientific establishing of his Christianity, or to
any sense of the specific aim of its development. He felt himself to be
separated from Kant by an impassable gulf. All the sharp antinomies
among which Kant moved, contrasts of that which is sensuous with that
which is reasonable, of experience with pure conception, of substance
and form in thought, of nature and freedom, of inclination and duty,
seemed to Herder grossly exaggerated, if not absolutely false. Sometimes
Herder speaks as if the end of life were simply the happiness which a
man gets out of the use of all his powers and out of the mere fact of
existence. Deeper is Kant's contention, that the true aim of life can be
only moral culture, even independent of happiness, or rather one must
find his noblest happiness in that moral culture.

At a period in his life when Herder had undergone conversion to court
orthodoxy at Bueckeburg and threatened to throw away that for which his
life had stood, he was greatly helped by Goethe. The identification of
Herder with Christianity continued to be more deep and direct than that
of Goethe ever became, yet Goethe has also his measure of significance
for our theme. If he steadied Herder in his religious experience, he
steadied others in their poetical emotionalism and artistic
sentimentality, which were fast becoming vices of the time. The classic
repose of his spirit, his apparently unconscious illustration of the
ancient maxim, 'nothing too much,' was the more remarkable, because
there were few influences in the whole gamut of human life to which he
did not sooner or later surrender himself, few experiences which he did
not seek, few areas of thought upon which he did not enter. Systems and
theories were never much to his mind. A fact, even if it were
inexplicable, interested him much more. To the evolution of formal
thought in his age he held himself receptive rather than directing. He
kept, to the last, his own manner of brooding and creating, within the
limits of a poetic impressionableness which instinctively viewed the
material world and the life of the soul in substantially similar
fashion. There is something almost humorous in the way in which he
eagerly appropriated the results of the philosophising of his time, in
so far as he could use these to sustain his own positions, and
caustically rejected those which he could not thus use. He soon got by
heart the negative lessons of Voltaire and fo