which represented the divine will infused into nature by God, or by supreme spiritual agencies bearing other names. Passive obedience to the "dunkle Drang," to the integral impulse of nature, is the supreme duty of man.20 The opposite of this natural man is the "world" of reflexion, learning, convention, in short, of objective conditions and rules of knowledge and conduct.

The naturalistic image is specifically identified with naturalistic impulse. Goethe's "dunkle Drang," "das zusammenbrennende, zusammentreffende Ganze," illustrate the essential characteristics of this type of image: spontaneity conceived as submission to the universal natural law acting as total integral impulse in the individual. While in rationalism and sense-ism the objective elements of the primary data of consciousness are overdeveloped, in naturalism the conception of image is characterized by onesidedly subjective individualistic features. The naturalistic image implies identification of the subjective self with universal nature in a sympathetic pantheism. The latter is distinct from the objective, ratiocinative pantheism of Rationalism, which appears in its purest form in the system of Spinoza.

Among the three principal types of monism during the age of Herder, two only, religious mysticism and materialism, are original. Romanticism, the third, is a transformation of the naturalistic dualism into a subjective, exclusively egocentric

monism.

Naturalism exhibited from the beginning a strongly monistic tendency. Rousseau and Hamann were prevented chiefly by their orthodoxy from rejecting the objective side of reality, which in its social institutions, traditions, and conventions irked them greatly. The orthodox church, both Catholic and Lutheran, however, would have condemned any monism, involving, as it must, in its conception of integral impulse a rejection of the dualistic doctrine of original sin, and of the antagonism of the flesh to the spirit, as heresy.

20 In Goethe's Werther and Wilhelm Meister the impulse-motivation is consistently carried out. See my "The Cultural Environment of the Philosophy of Kant," pp. 61-67. Whitman's noun "urge" is a characteristic image of the naturalistic interpretation of impulse.

The originators of German romanticism, young intellectuals, who, in an age of political absolutism, found themselves excluded from creative participation in government and administration, and baffled in a petrified social system of rigid class differentiation, had only one sphere left for unhampered activity: their own inner personalities. Their absorption in the analysis, development, and expression of their inner states led inevitably to a neglect of social-ethical conduct and scientific pursuits, which imply a dualistic view giving sincere and comprehensive recognition to the objective, external side of reality. The reality of romanticism is a world in which temperament has the right of way.

The characteristic departure of romanticism from naturalism was an intensification of the conception of personality, by absorption of all objective factors, in a subjective absolute. Romanticism took over the fundamental images and terms of naturalism. The greater part of the work of the First Romantic School, especially that of Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis, Schleiermacher in his youth, is an intense and confused, yet consistent effort to adapt these terms to the romantic doctrine of absolute egocentrism. The Athenäum and Friedrich Schlegel's early essays and reviews, especially the review of Wilhelm Meister, are the repositories of this almost fanatical endeavor. The conceptions of totality, of integral unity, of total impulse representing the supreme spiritual law (not of the universe however, but of the universal ego!), of spontaneity as passive submission to the inner law of being, of a sentimental cosmic vitalism, of an infinite "Becoming"; of "Gefühl ist Alles": all these and related terms form the foundation of romantic discourse.

Integral image is the primary unit of consciousness and characteristic index of the romantic philosophy also. It is, however, limited in its constitution to essentially temperamental elements. The romantic image is fundamentally "Stimmungsbild," image of a spontaneous state of mind, of mood.21

Religious mysticism, a theocentric monism, which tries to transcend all objective reality, was of comparatively little im21 I have in preparation a comprehensive study of the romantic image.

portance in Herder's time. The rationalistic and scientific preoccupations of the age and the interest in the realities of sense life did not favor a passionate withdrawal from the concerns of the world. But the great mystics, from Eckhart and Tauler to Jakob Böhme, exercised a profound influence upon some of the serious minds of the eighteenth century. Their primary terms were, on account of the mystical desire to transcend the vanities of earthly existence, necessarily very few. Since mysticism is a spiritual monism, i.e., a conception of all reality as contained in God, its primary terms of consciousness must convey integral manifestations of the supreme absolute personality, of spiritual unity, and of integration in God. Its images are expressive particularly of a central fire, a central light,22 and rapturous totalistic visions of the beatitudes. It was especially romanticism, which, confounding its subjective temperamental monism with the truly spiritual monism of mysticism, misapplied the mystical images of theocentrism to its own egocentric notions and desires.

Materialism, the third monistic system, is of little importance for our problem. Rejecting the conception of personality as primary, and interpreting it as a class of reflexes of mechanical processes, it must consistently deny the primary reality of image. Similarly as strict rationalism, it must regard image as a non-essential device of rhetoric or ornamentation; indeed, as a form of illusion. "Illusionism" in art is founded on materialistic naturalism. Materialism differs from rationalism chiefly in its greater stress on demonstrable "facts," and on the greater literalness of its terms and images.

Herder resolved the absolute, dialectic antithesis of mind and mechanism, on which the other systems rested, in his conception of personality. Viewing all the data concerning the functions of mind and the relations of mind to its total environment, in the focus of that conception, he arrived at a fundamentally new synthesis.

Herder's conception of image as the primary integral expression of personality is thus the keystone of his philosophy, 22 Cp. Goethe's "Zusammenbrennendes . . . Ganze," in Wilhelm Meister; and "Innre Wärme, Mittelpunkt," in Wanderers Sturmlied.

which stands in monumental and beautiful simplicity and harmony.

The philosophy of humanism created by Herder is more comprehensive and more fruitful than any other of the theoretic humanisms of the eighteenth century. It is not merely a revival of the Renaissance. It is, indeed, actuated by the fundamental impulse common to all humanistic revivals from ages farther removed from that of Sophocles' Antigone than the latter is from ours, down to the present time: belief in the primacy of individual personality as the judge and master of circumstance and as the standard of values. But in its essentials it is new. It is the most comprehensive and informed interpretation of man and his world, at the beginning of the present age.

The true significance of this humanism is obscured rather than clarified by analogies taken from the Renaissance. The humanism of the latter rested on a conception of individual personality as an absolute and primary datum. The mind of the Renaissance was unaware of relations by which personality is genetically conditioned. History and natural science, traditions and institutions, biological and social environment as a whole, were to that mind no more than a more or less homogeneous and appropriate background against which man was seen as essentially absolute and self-motived. The motivation of the characters in Shakespeare's tragedies is the greatest and most characteristic expression of the Renaissance conception of the relations of man to his environment.

It was not really until the beginning of the eighteenth century that, both in science, particularly in physiology, and in history, advanced minds began to doubt the absolute autonomy of man. Both physiologists and historians began to collect and classify instances of conditions which had to be considered not merely as external circumstances encountered by free will, but as factors having part in the shaping of personality itself, and thus as formative antecedents of the will. Gradually and fragmentarily, the genetic conception of life emerged.

This vast movement in which the dominant intellectual impulse of the modern age had its origin culminated in Herder's

philosophy. Herder expanded and enriched the genetic conception and applied it to all the fundamental conceptions involved in his principle of personality. The chief among these conceptions are those of mind and will; of organic being; of national, racial and international society; of art, knowledge, and faith; of history; of religion. By virtue of his unequaled power of specific discernment, supported by an inexhaustible store of knowledge, he differentiated the integral functions of the mind and the genetic relations between personality and environment into their fundamental and specific constituents. From this view of life, which is a specific genetic realism, he projected his faith in "Humanität," an ideal, in the pursuit of which even the present age may avoid both the brutalities of materialism and sensualism, and the futilities of aestheticism, pseudo-spiritualism, and scholasticism.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO