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Untitled Article
depth and exactness of attainment in any one department of human learning . But Herder , though he had not the profound erudition of a Heyne and a Niebuhr , or the accurate science of a Humboldt and a Blumenbach , possessed , nevertheless , those qualities of mind , which enabled him to turn to the best account the researches of others—to catch the most prominent
features of his subject , and to group skilfully together those great general facts which distinguish the history of the human species . His ardent genius was ill-suited to the minute investigation and toilsome accumulations of an original inquirer ^ but eagerly appropriated the copious materials laid up in the vast repositories of learning , and sought to introduce light arid order and harmony into the wide chaos of warring facts and conflicting opinions ,
¦ which they exhibited . To the strongest religious convictions and an exquisite sense of the good and beautiful , he added a power , which was almost peculiar to himself , of seizing the spirit of a particular literature and of a particular state of society , and could , therefore , warmly sympathise with what was estimable in
humanity , under its most diversified aspects . A reverence for man , as man—and a benevolent solicitude to promote whatever can improve his condition and exalt his nature , is the predominant feeling which pervades his whole work . Consecrated by an association with these views , the simplest effusions of human sentiment , and the rudest memorials of manners and
characterpossessed for him the deepest interest . He thought with Bacon that a ballad or a legend often more faithfully indicated the current of popular feeling , and were better worth studying by the historian of mankind , than the graver productions which are less impregnated with the spirit of the age , and in which the cold , technical exercise of the intellect has repressed the free and natural outpourings of the heart . He had traversed the most varied and distant fields of literature ; and from the
pine-forests of Scandinavia , amid the vast plains of Tartary , in the wilds of Madagascar , —and even on those neglected wastes which skirt the east of Europe , on the confines of the Teutonic and Slavonic races , had culled the sweetest wild flowers of popular poesy * He has collected these gathered treasures in his delightful volume , * The Voices of Nations in their Songs ;' which may be regarded almost in the light of apiece justificative of the principles developed in the graver work now before us *
* Early in life / he says , t in the preface to this latter work , ' the thought often occurred to me , since everything in this world has its science and its philosophy , should not that , too , which most nearly concerns us—the history of mankind—also have , in a large and general sense ; ita science and its philosophy ? Every pursuit reminded me of the suggestion ; metaphysics and morals , physics and natural history , but , above all—religion . Could it be , I thought , that the * Stimmen der Vdlker ia Liedera . Werke , Band xxiv . f Vonede , p . 10—15 .
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3 ( 5 'the Philosophy oj the History of Mankind .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1832, page 36, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1804/page/36/
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