activities, which came closer to living nature than anything which the
world had yet seen.

To this group of æsthetic 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 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