find his noblest happiness in that moral culture.

At a period in his life when Herder had undergone conversion to court
orthodoxy at Bückeburg 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 found, to use the words which
he puts into the mouth of Faust, that while it freed him from his
superstitions, at the same time it made the world empty and dismal
beyond endurance. In the mechanical philosophy which presented itself in
the _Système de la Nature_ as a positive substitute for his lost faith,