Note 203 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Many minds of the period, doubtless, are typified by Herder, who, though a practising clergyman, was clearly a Spinozistic theist, accommodating himself to popular Christianity in a genially latitudinarian spirit.203 When in his youth he published an essay discussing Genesis as a piece of oriental poetry, not to be treated as science or theology, he evoked an amount of hostility which startled him.204 Learning his lesson, he was for the future guarded enough to escape persecution. He was led by his own temperamental bias, however, to a transcendental position in philosophy. Originally in agreement with Kant,205 as against the current metaphysic, in the period before the issue of the latter’s Critique of Pure Reason, he nourished his religious instincts by a discursive reading of history, which he handled in a comparatively scientific yet above all poetic or theosophic spirit, while Kant, who had little or no interest in history, developed his thought on the side of physical science.206 The philosophic methods of the two men thus became opposed; and when Herder found Kant’s philosophy producing a strongly rationalistic cast of thought among the divinity students who came before him for examination, he directly and sharply antagonized it207 in a theistic sense. Yet his own influence on his age was on the whole latitudinarian and anti-theological; he opposed to the apriorism of Kant the view that the concepts of space and time are the results of experience and an abstraction of its contents; his historic studies had developed in him a conception of the process of evolution alike in life, opinion, and faculty; and orthodoxy and philosophy alike incline to rank him as a pantheist.208