Herder, JOHANN GOTTFRIED, one of the most thoughtful and suggestive of German writers, called by De Quincey the Coleridge of Germany, equally important as a philosopher, a theologian, and a literary critic, was born at Mohrungen, in East Prussia, on 25th August 1744. He studied at Königsberg, and there became acquainted with Kant and Hamann, the 'Magus of the North.' The latter inspired young Herder with love for the poetry of primitive peoples and the study of the obscure beginnings of civilisation, and for the literature and lore of the Orient, especially of the Bible. But perhaps the greatest thing that Hamann did for Herder was to awaken him to intellectual freedom, to emancipate his mind from traditional habits of thinking and stimulate him to prosecute lines of independent search. In 1764 Herder became assistant-teacher in a school, and assistant-pastor in certain churches, in Riga. Being convinced that literature was to be his life's calling, he began to practise it by writing Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur
(1766-67), Die kritischen Wälder (1769), and minor pieces, in which he maintained that the truest poetry is the poetry of the people, the spontaneous, unartificial expression of the characteristic human nature that is in them; and, in the spirit of Winckelmann and Lessing, he took up a brief for the idiosyncratic development of national genius in opposition to the fashionable pseudo-classicism of the day. He was an impressive preacher, the subject of his sermons, as of all his writings, being man qua man in all phases of his essential and complex nature. Leaving Riga in 1769, he spent some months in travel. It was during this tour that he made the acquaintance of young Goethe at Strasburg; from Herder the future literary imperator of Germany learned to understand the realities of life. In 1770 Herder accepted the appointment of court-preacher at Bückenburg; but six years later he exchanged this uncongenial post for that of first preacher in the town church of Weimar, a position which, partly owing to untoward circumstances, partly—and perhaps principally—to his own innate irritability of temper, proved to be little less congenial, in spite of his intercourse with Goethe and the other literary celebrities then gathered in Weimar. It was there that Herder died on 18th December 1803.
Herder's love for the songs of the people, for human nature unadulterated, for simple truth warm with the blood of life's reality, in preference to classic grace and coldness, and the beautiful but artificial poetry of cultured minds, found expression in an admirable collection of folksongs, Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1778-79), in his favourite book, Vom Geiste der Hebräischen Poesie (1782-83; Eng. trans. by James Marsh, 1833), Ueber die Wirkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der Völker (1778), in a series of oriental mythological tales, in parables and legends, in his version of the Cid (1805), and other works. The principal constructive idea of his thinking was, however, what we should now call the sense of the supreme importance of the historical method. The stimulus of this thought is discernible not only in the works quoted above, but in such books as Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), Die älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts (1774-76), and especially in his greatest masterpiece, Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91; Eng. trans. by T. Churchill, 1800), which, like so many of his other books, was left uncompleted. This work is not only the ripest product of his thinking; it is, as it were, the capital of his intellectual kingdom, in which are gathered all the wealth and beauty and power of his mind. Besides its great intrinsic value, the book is remarkable for its anticipations and adumbrations of evolutionary theories. Herder shows that higher and higher types of organisation are observable in all things, stones, plants, and animals, until the culminating type is reached in man; and, as the scale is ascended, a closer and closer resemblance to the culminating type is revealed both in organisation and in the development of powers and instincts. Moreover, the more complex the organisation of a being the greater the extent to which that organisation partakes of the forms existent in the lower grades. But he does not vitalise the scheme of the universe by the conception of genetic development, or the doctrine of organic descent. He does, however, recognise, in a more or less imperfect way, the struggle for existence and adaptation to environment. The end for which all things exist that do exist is, he teaches, man, the crowning work of the universe. But man is not merely the crowning work of the universe; he is also, by analogy of reasoning from the laws of nature, the first and rudest link in a still higher series of existences, and what he has in common with them is his pure humanity, his intelligent, sensitive, and spiritual powers. Hence the life-business of man, the loftiest aim of philosophy and religion, is to cultivate these. Herder is one of the few authors who appreciate the poetry in philosophy and the higher synthesis of both with religion; yet he can scarcely be called a great writer. His last years were chiefly occupied, apart from the Ideen, with the Humanitätsbriefe (1793-97) and an ill-advised polemic against Kant.
His Sämtliche Werke (60 vols.) were published in 1827-30; later issues are Suphan's (32 vols. 1877-87) and his edition (with Redlich) of the 'selected works' (9 vols. 1884 sq.). See Erinnerungen, by Herder's widow (1830); the Lebensbild, by his son Emil (1846-47); and collections of his Letters. The standard Life is Haym's (2 vols. 1880-85); but see shorter lives by Kuhnemann (Munich, 1894), Jorel (Paris, 1875), and Nevinson (London, 1884).