storical science which
has proved one of the most fertile; A.W. Schlegel and his school, when
they transplanted all the poetry of other nations to Germany by means of
imitations which are real wonders of assimilation; Frederick Schlegel,
when, in the _Wisdom of the Hindoos_ he opened out that vast field of
comparative linguistic science, which Bopp and so many others have since
cultivated with such success; Alexander von Humboldt and Karl Ritter,
when they gave a new life to geography by showing the earth in its
growth and development and coherence; W. von Humboldt, when he
established the laws of language as well as those of self-government;
Jacob Grimm, when he brought German philology into existence, while his
brother Wilhelm made a science of Northern mythology; still later on,
D.F. Strauss, when, in the days of our own youth, he placed the myth and
the legend, with their unconscious origin and growth, not alone in
opposition to the idea of Deity intervening to interrupt established
order, but also to that of imposture and conscious fraud; Otfr. Mueller,
when he proved that Greek mythology, far from containing moral
abstractions or historical facts, is the involuntary personification of
surrounding nature, subsequently developed by imagination; Max Mueller,
even, when he creates the new science of comparative mythology--what
else are they doing but applying and working out Herder's ideas? And if
we turn our eyes to other nations, what else were Burke and Coleridge,
B. Constant and A. Thierry, Guizot and A. de Tocqueville--what are Renan
and Taine, Carlyle and Darwin doing, each in his own branch, but
applying and developing Herder's two fundamental principles, that of
organic evolution and that of the entireness of the individual? For it
was Herder who discovered the true spirit of history, and in this sense
it is that Goethe was justified in saying of him:

"A noble mind, desirous of fathoming man's soul in whatever direction it
may shoot forth, searcheth throughout the universe for sound and word
which flow through the lands in a thousand sources and brooks; wanders
through the oldest as the newest regions and listens in every zone."
"He knew how to find this soul wherever it lay hid, whether robed in
grave disguise, or lightly clothed in the garb of play, in order to
found for the future this lofty rule: Humanity be our eternal aim!"

Among the young literary rebels who, under Herder's guidance, attempted,
towar