Herder and Francis Bacon
H. B. Nisbet
The Modern Language Review, Vol. 62, No. 2. (Apr., 1967), pp. 267-283.
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Sat May 26 12:58:54 2007
HERDER AND FRANCIS BACON
The links between Herder, who is usually portrayed in the first place as a restless
adversary of rationalism and progenitor of the Storm and Stress movement in
German literature, and Francis Bacon, the renowned empiricist and sober reasoner
whose ideas were put into practice by the Royal Society, would at first seem remote.
But it is particularly important that the very real affinities between the two should
no longer be overlooked, because if it can be shown that they do indeed exist, and
that they are not after all difficult to discover, we are at once led to question and
revaluate some of the traditional notions about Herder. For it is precisely the
traditional conception of Herder as an 'irrationalist', one who revolted against the
Age of Reason and who deplored the effects of science upon modern civilization,
that has led critics to ignore or overlook the great influence which, throughout
Herder's life, Francis Bacon had upon him.
Suphan's index to the standard edition of Herder's works gives an inadequate
indication of Herder's debt to Bacon. The index lists by no means all of Herder's
references to the English philosopher; in fact, from I 764 onwards, Herder refers to
him explicitly in his works and correspondence on upwards of eighty separate
occasions, and echoes his ideas and words countless other times. Moreover, lengthy
extracts from Bacon's .hrovumorganum and De augmentis scientiarum also survive among
Herder's unpublished MSSS1And while most of the references in his published
writings are to these two works, he frequently refers also to the New Atlantis, De
~apientiaaeterum, and Essays ('Sermonesjdeles'), indicating in one remark that he had
read at least some of Bacon's writings both in English and in German2 (as well, of
course, as in Latin). O n several occasions, he incorporates whole pages, translated
from Bacon, in his own works. And finally, in the I 780's, he planned to publish a
German or Latin edition of the De augmentis and failed to do so only because he was
forestalled in both cases by other editors3
It can be demonstrated with tolerable certainty that Herder's enthusiasm for
Bacon was first aroused, around 1764, by Hamann (although Kant no doubt also
mentioned him in the lectures which Herder then attended in Konigsberg).
Hamann himself had only recently become interested in Bacon, in fact in 1759, a
few years before he met Herder.4 He mentions him nine times in his Aesthetica in
nuce ( I 762), the work of his which Herder quotes more frequently than any other.
Indeed, in a footnote to his famous dictum 'Poesie ist die Muttersprache des
Menschengeschlechts',5 Hamann refers explicitly to a similar statement in Bacon's
De augmentis; but when we find Herder quoting Hamann's words and mentioning
the source in Bacon all in one sentence (SMTxvr, 19), and, on another occasion,
1 Stiftunp. Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Depot der Staatshibliothek, Tubingen. Herder-Nachla5,
Kapsel xx< Nr. 69-75.
2 Herders Sammtliche Werke, herausgegeben von Bernhard Suphan, 33 Bde. (Berlin 1877-1913),
VIII, 320; referred to in the text as 'SW'. References to works of other authors are preceded by
'Hamann', 'Bacon', etc.
3 'Aus Herders Briefwechsel', ed. H . Gelzer, Protestantische Monatsblatter, 14(1859), 120. (Herder
to Georg Muller, 30 December 1787.)
4 See R. Unger, Hamann und die Aufklamng, 2. AuA. (Halle/Saale, 1g25), note to p. 509.
5 Hamanns Werke, herausgegeben von Josef Nadler, 6 Bde. (Wien, 1g49-57), 11, 197.
Herder and Francis Bacon
quoting Hamann together with a further passage from Bacon which also appears in
Hamann's Aesthetics (SW XXII,121-2; cf. Hamann 11, 207), it becomes obvious
that the two writers were associated in Herder's mind, and lends support to our
contention that Bacon's ideas first reached him through Hamann.
Like Hamann, the young Herder found certain of Bacon's ideas on language
and poetry congenial. Both thinkers were attracted by his empiricism, finding it
akin to their own belief in the concrete world, in the world of the senses, which
they exalted in opposition to the abstractions of German Enlightenment philosophy.
Herder, for example, several times quotes Bacon in support of his conviction that
words, particularly abstract terms, may mislead us into accepting traditional
prejudices (cf. Bacon's idola) which have become enshrined in our language and
which we have failed to test against observable nature;l for thought should be the
master, not the slave of expression. Like Bacon, Herder also contended that
language reflects national character, and, in 1785, he reiterates Bacon's appeal
for an 'allgemeine Physiognomik der Volker aus ihren Sprachen' (SW XIII, 364;
cf. Bacon IV, 442). Bacon, again like Herder, had advocated borrowing from other
languages in order to enrich our own, but warned on the other hand against
over-literal imitation, for example of ancient verse-forms (Bacon IV, 444). I-Iis
following words are in fact closely similar in their tone to that of Herder's early
Fragmente, although Herder is more insistent upon the dangers of incautious
borrowing :
For not only may languages be enriched by mutual exchanges, but the several beauties of
each may be combined.
into a most beautiful image
And a t the same time there will
be attained . . . signs of no slight value
concerning the dispositions and manners of
peoples and nations, drawn from their languages. (Bacon IV, 441-2)
..
...
...
Both therefore believed that every language is relative to a historical and cultural
context, and that all language tends to become misleading or meaningless when
divorced from empirical reality.
Bacon had maintained that 'as hieroglyphics came before letters, so parables
came before arguments' (Bacon III, 698). This was the passage which Hamann
cited in support of his idea that poetry emerged before prose, and Herder, of course,
adopted this notion in his Fragmente. And although Bacon, unlike Herder, had little
sense for lyrical poetry, and preferred allegorical and didactic poems above all
others, further general reflections of his concerning poetry are akin to ideas of
Herder. But when Herder, again in the Fragmente, renews Hamann's wish that a
'new mythology' will replace the outworn rococo conventions borrowed from
classical mythology, and recommends either that a new imagery should be borrowed from natural history and science (e.g. SW I, 434 and 448) or that the
ancient myths should be given a new 'geistigern Sinn' (SW I, 448), he disagrees
with Bacon, who, in his De sapientia veterum, had read a political significance into
many ancient myths. Presumably he disagreed because he believed that poetry
should express primarily the poet's emotions rather than any practical or moral
doctrines. O n the other hand, Bacon, in the work just named, had interpreted many
other ancient myths in terms of natural phenomena, just as Herder later elabora1 SW I, 415 (1767), v, 153 (1770), xxr, 42 (1799); cf. also W0rk.r ofFrancis Bacon, edited by James
Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14vols. (1857-74), IV,55 and 61 (references
to vols. IV and v are to the editors' translations of Bacon's Latin philosophical works).
H. B. NISBET
269
ted the similar conception of a new poetic imagery borrowed from science and
the natural world (e.g. SW 111, 261-2).
In 1781, Herder quotes a long extract from Bacon on poetry (SW XI, 81-2; cf.
Bacon IV, 315-1 7). In this extract there appears not only the above-quoted passage
on hieroglyphs, as well as the statement that poetry has a divine quality (cf.
Hamann's and Herder's notion of the divine essence of poetry), but also, in an
accurate German translation, the words: 'Die dramatische Poesie ist eine
anschaubare Geschichte, sie hat einen Schauplatz, der so groB als die Welt ist.'
The similarity between these words and Herder's description of Shakespeare's
drama, in his essay on Shakespeare, as 'Eine Welt Dramatischer Geschichte, so
groB und tief wie die Natur' (SW v, 2 2 1 ) ' is obvious. But Herder not only follows
Bacon in describing drama as 'history'. He considers Shakespeare as an interpreter
of providence, just as Bacon had said that the dramatic poet shows us more clearly
the justice, wisdom or 'law of providence' (Bacon IV, 3 16), which is often obscured
in the turmoil of history itself. Admittedly this conception of dramatic theodicy
was familiar to Herder from Lessing's writings, and it arose naturally out of the
Leibnizian tradition in Germany. But apart from all this, Herder shares with Bacon
the conviction that all poetry isor ought to be ultimately rooted in our experience,
through the senses, of the natural world. And Bacon, in the same extract which
Herder cites, compares poetry to a plant, in the same way as Herder constantly
employs organic metaphors in his early writings on literature. On the other hand,
Herder seems to have taken less interest than Hamann did in Bacon's words on
parables and allegories and their mystical or religious sense. But as Unger remarks
(p. 244), Hamann always tended to re-interpret the naturalistic Bacon in terms
of his own mystical philosophy, while religious mysticism has relatively little share
in Herder's attitude to poetry, and still less in Bacon's.
More significant for the young Herder, however, than Bacon's scattered
utterances on language and poetry, was the actual example of Bacon as a personality embodying Herder's own ideals of the learned genius or polymath. The
y o u n g ~ e r d e rbelieved that the 'genius' as such cannot be taught, but only fired
bv the e x a m ~ l eof another of his own kind. Thus,. only, if someone such as Bacon
stands as an example before another who is capable of emulating him, 'konnte an
ihm [i.e. Bacon] ein zweiter Baco entstehen, so wie Alexander an dem Grabe des
Achilles, und Casar an der Bildsaule Alexanders' (SW 11, 266 (1768)). Bacon is
named repeatedly as a genius capable of inspiring youth with desire for allembracing learning (e.g. SW IX, 427, XI, 58, XXX, 413, etc.). This was indeed the
inspiration which Bacon, like Kant, had given to the young Herder himself, as is
clear from a poetic fragment of 1764, in which he names the two as his mentors
(SW x x ~ x 240).
,
He saw in Bacon the universal and healthy as distinct from the
one-sided or pathological genius, as one who had developed all his intellectual
powers equally as an integral whole. For while he admires most of all Bacon's
'Witz', his ability to link all disparate areas of experience, he contends that Bacon
also possessed 'Scharfsinn', the ability to analyse and distinguish. Both abilities,
he writes (in 1775 and 1778), are necessary (SW VIII, 320 and 329; VIII, 196 and
216). In contrast to his earlier rhapsodic paeans on the poetic genius (and no doubt
as a reaction against the aesthetic and moral excesses of the Storm and Stress
'Kraftgenies' who had meanwhile appeared), he maintains in 1778 that the true
genius is characterized not by exaggerated 'Enthusiasmus', but by moderation, by
270
Herder and Francis Bacon
balanced development of all his powers (SW VIII,230). I t is worth observing with
Unger (p. 280) that Edward Young, who had done so much to establish the cult
of genius, likewise looked up to Bacon as his example and mentor. Yet Bacon
himself had little to say about poetic or scholarly genius. Paradoxically enough, he
declared that his empirical philosophy, when applied to the study of nature in the
way he recommends, 'places all wits and understandings nearly on a level' (Bacon
IV, 63).
But Herder did not regard Bacon as a model for the poetic genius such as he
hoped, when he wrote his early works, would help to rejuvenate German poetry.
For Herder, his genius lay in his capacity as a polyhistor, not as an artist. His mind
encompassed all departments of learning, and his universal philosophy incorporates the ideal triad of truth, beauty, and goodness (SW XXVII, 352). He was, in
fact, a model for Herder himself as a seeker after all possible learning, not for
German poets as a fellow poet - Shakespeare fulfilled the latter function in
Herder's scheme. Yet even among polymaths, Bacon appears exceptional:
'Ich weiB, daR fur jeden Polyhistor viele, und fur einen Baco alle MTiBenschaften
verbunden seyn miinen. . . ' (SW 11, 357 (1768)). Suphan rightly relates Herder's
vast plans, in his early years, for works embracing all human knowledge (e.g. his
'Universalgeschichte der Bildung der Welt', SW IV, 353), to the influence of Bacon
and Kant :
Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Geschichte des menschlichen Verstandes - aus dem
Riesengedanken eines solchen Unternehmens, der von Baco und Kant geweckt schon dem
zwanzigjahringen Jiinglinge als Lebensaufgabe vorschwebt, ist . . . fast jede groRe Leistung
unseres Autors hervorgegangen. (SW xrr, 405 [editor's 'SchluBbericht'] )
Like Bacon, he continually seeks to expand, fill out, and correlate every area of
knowledge. As Haym remarks :l
Immer hat unser Verfasser, wie Baco, zahlreiche Desiderata auf dem Herzen; immer deutet
er, wie jener, auf noch unentdeckte oder doch unbekannte Stellen des globus intellectualis.
Mindful of the stimulus he had himself received from Bacon, Herder often recommends him as a guide in education, as for example in the Journal of I 769:
. . man werde uberall wie Bacon [this spelling alternates with 'Baco' and 'Bako' in
Herder's writings], um auf Lebenszeit zu entziinden und den Jungling auf die Akademie
zu lassen, nicht als einen, der seine Studien vollendet hat, sondern sie erst anfangt . . .
(SWIV, 382; cf. 384 and 385)
.
Since Herder himself was hostile to all closed systems of knowledge, he admired
Bacon's conception of learning as a continual dynamic process, and in 1772 he
stresses 'was Bako von dem Schadlichen der Kompendien sagt, wie sie heucheln!
wie sie die Wissenschaft, als scheinbares Ganze, iiberkleistern !' (SW XXXIII, 2 I 7 ;
cf IX, 413). Bacon's fragmentary style is akin to Herder's, and the following
words from his De augmentis, quoted in translation by Herder in 1781, are entirely
in the latter's spirit:
So lange die Wissenschaft in Aphorismen und Reobachtungen ausgestreut ist, kann sie
wachsen: von der Methode umzaunt und umschlossen, kann sie etwa erlautert, gefeilt,
zum Gebrauch bequem gemacht werden, an Gehalt aber nimmt sie nicht mehr zu.
(SW x, 401; cf. Bacon 111, 292)
1
Rudolf Haym, Herder, 2. Ausgabe, 2 Bde. (Berlin, 1g54), I,
277.
H. B. NISBET
27'
He also agrees with Bacon when he cites his remark that knowledge ought to be
cultivated in the first instance for its own sake, not for any utilitarian end (SW v,
652 ( I 775) ; cf. XI, 10I ( I 78 I ) ) .With all this in mind, he several times advises young
students to study Bacon, as in a letter to the young Georg Miiller in 1780.1 Even
Goethe, who rejected Bacon's philosophy as a whole, concedes that his works are
s t i m ~ l a t i n g :'~Hochst erfreulich dagegen ist sein Aufregen, Aufmuntern und
VerheiBen.' And Herder himself, especially in his early years, did not look to
Bacon in the first place for information on the ultimate nature of existence. I t was
basically his general approach to knowledge, universal, dynamic, open and
naturalistic, which appealed to him: '. . . daran liegt mir nicht was Baco ausgedacht hat; sondern wie er dachte' (SW 11, 263 ( I 768)).
Critics are more or less agreed that there is a pronounced 'empirical' element
in Herder's thought. Again and again, in theory, though not always in practice,
he supports 'Erfahrung' as opposed to 'Metaphysik' (e.g. SW XII, 9, I 10, and
177). In so far as his ideas have any real empirical and inductive foundation3 (we
need only recall his Rousseauistic revolt, in the Journal of 1769, against abstract
philosophy and in favour of the world of the senses), he makes it abundantly clear
that it was chiefly to Bacon, with his commercium mentis et rei, that he looked as his
theoretical guide, and in practice, his own nature always disposed him in favour of
concrete experience and the natural world. He refers to Bacon again and again
when he impugns a priori thinking, and the following passage, written in 1769,
shows how thoroughly Baconian his own conception of empirical induction is:
Alle Gesetze der Attraktion sind nichts als bernerkte Eigenschaften, die wir unter einander
ordnen, bis ein Hauptgrundsatz wird . . . Je mehr wir diese [Grundsatze] unter einander
ordnen konnen, desto weniger und einfacher werden die Gesetze, desto naher kornmen wir
Einern Begriff, dern Hauptbegriff des Wesens. (SW rv, 465)
This attitude is typical of what Dewey calls the 'demand for assurance and order',4
characteristic of empirical philosophy and scientific thinking before Berkeley and
Hume. I t is nothing less than a revival of Bacon's supremely confident belief that
inductive methods can provide us with ultimate and infallible answers concerning
the laws and nature of the universe. For Bacon had declared that we should
proceed, commencing with the observations of our senses, 'from particulars to
lesser axioms; and then to middle axioms, one above the other; and last of all to the
most general' (Bacon IV, 97), SO that universal explanation will at last be attained,
'for beyond all doubt there is a single and summary law in which nature centres
and which is subject and subordinate to God' (Bacon 111, 730). It is clear from
another passage in the Journal that Herder is fully aware that these notions come
from Bacon: '. . . seine Aussichten von einem Begriffe auf einen hohern auszubreiten, im Geist eines Bako, was ware das fiir ein Werk!' (SW IV, 384). At least
in those works which deal with formal philosophy, he agrees with Bacon that all
1 Herders Briefe (Auswahl), edited by W. Dobbek (Weimar, 1959)~
p. 198, 18 October 1780; cf.
SW IX, 427 and XI, 58.
2 Goethes Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe ( 1 8 8 7 - ~ g ~ g11.
) , Abth. 111, 228 (Zur Farbenlehre).
8 See H. B. Nisbet, 3.G . Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science, Diss. (Edinburgh, 1965),
I, 10 and 68, where I have tried to show to what extent he himself entertains a priori and speculative
ideas, despite his protests against them.
4 John Dewey, Experience and Nature, The Paul Carus Foundation Lectures (Chicago and London,
19%)~PP. 12-13.
272
Herder and Francis Bacon
knowledge is derived from the senses. For instance, he sets out, with limited success,
in his essay Vom Erkennell und Empjnden of 1778, to show that all knowledge
('Erkennen') is ultimately acquired through sensation ('Empfindung'), and that
the higher mental faculties draw their data from the lower, while Bacon had
written :
. . . all Interpretation of Nature commences with the senses, and leads from the perceptions
of the senses by a straight, regular and guarded path to the perceptions of the understanding,
which are true notions and axioms. (Bacon IV, 192)
But by Herder's time, the theory of empiricism, as in the writings of Hume and
even of the early Kant, had become increasingly associated with scepticism; this
association has lasted down to the present day. Herder's more naive beliefs are
those of an earlier age. Thus, even where he explicitly supports empirical views,
he cannot be called an empiricist either by modern standards or by those of more
rigorous empiricists in his own times. What is variously styled his 'empirical',
'inductive', or even 'positivistic' method retains the naively optimistic quality of
its Renaissance ancestry. Thus all these words are inadequate for describing his
interest in sense-experience as opposed to 'metaphysics'; for firstly, his empiricism
lacks the sceptical, self-limiting discipline found in all modern scientific empiricism,
and is not even as consistent as that of Locke, whose rejection of innate ideas
Herder considered too extreme (SW v, 411); secondly, his inductive method
simply consists of an unquestioning common-sense explanation of how we can
obtain certain knowledge of the external world, instead of grappling with the
epistemological difficulties associated with what has been known since Berkeley and
Hume as the 'problem of induction'; and thirdly, his positivism is lacking in a
consistent phenomenalistic interpretation of nature such as we find in the philosophies of the later positivists, for in his Gott of 1787 and in many other works, he
postulates throughout nature innumerable soul-like 'Krafte' upon whose inner
quality or 'divine essence' he continually speculates.
In fact, those methods of Herder hitherto described as empirical or inductive
can be so designated only in a Baconian sense, since he shares with Bacon in large
measure the polymath's belief that universal knowledge of the laws of nature will
eventually be possible, and since he never attempts a thorough logical analysis of
the limitations of empirical enquiry as nearly all empirical philosophers since
Hume have done. This phase of Herder's thought may therefore best be described
by the more general term 'naturalism', or, in the more particularly psychological
context of the 1778 essay, as 'sensationalism' within the broad tradition of Locke
and the attitude that nihil est in intellectu, quod nonfuerit in sensu.
Herder's 'Baconian naturalism' reveals itself most clearly in his late attacks upon
Kant, in which, however, even if we disregard the vexed question of a priori ideas,
his attempts to refute Kant's arguments concerning the logical functions of the mind
by describing the fisychological development of the mind betray a fundamental
philosophical misunderstanding. For the two approaches are not mutually exclusive, as Herder seems to have supposed, but complementary. And as Korner puts it :l
The use of the language of introspective psychology in the Transcendental Logic, which was
to be concerned with the possibility of objective experience and not with its natural history,
might easily lead to a confusion of its subject-matter with that of psychology. Against such
confusion Kant issues frequent and forceful warnings.
1 S.
Korner, Kant (Harmondsworth,
1955),p. 60.
H. B. NISBET
*73
These warnings Herder failed to heed. Bacon's naturalism only confirmed him in
his misunderstanding of the critical philosophy, and it is no coincidence that
immediately after the words 'Das unziemende Wort Kritik der Vernunft verliert
sich also in das anstandigere, wahre: Physiologic der menschlichen Erkenntnipkrafte' he
quotes a long passage from Bacon's Novum organum on the virtues of empirical
observation (SW XXI, 41 ff. (Metakritik)). This is another instance of the naive
common-sense belief, as alive today as in Herder's time, that causal explanation
based on experience somehow renders it invalid or unnecessary for us to examine
logically firstly the philosophical possibility of knowledge, and secondly, the
conclusions to which experiential knowledge leads.
The Baconian associa~ionsand origins o f ~ e r d e r ' sfeud, in his last years, against
Kant, can be traced back to his earliest years as a thinker. I t is well known that he
found the primary inspiration for his Metakritik against Kant in an earlier essay
of Hamann's entitled Metakritik iiber den Purismum der Vernunft (cf. Haym 11, 274;
also Hamann III, 283-g), in which Hamann struck out at Kant's critical philosophy
for divorcing the concepts of the understanding from the experience of the senses.
This, however, was an old theme of Hamann's, which he had developed in his
Kreucziige des Philologen, particularly in his Aesthetica in nuce in 1762 in criticizing
the abstract aesthetics of the German Enlightenment. As we have already seen, it
was in this work that he quoted Bacon most frequently. And when Herder, in his
Kalligone (his counterblast to Kant's aesthetics), cites Bacon against Kant, we find
among his quotations the following (in German translation), which had also
appeared in Hamann's Aesthetica in nuce:
Hinweg, sagt Bako, die ungeschickten Welten-Maaschen! die Aeffchen [modulos et
rimiolas mundorum], die die Phantasieen der Menschen in ihren Philosophieen aufgestellt
haben . . . Des menschlichen Verstandes Idole sind nichts als beliebige Abstraktionen . . .
(SW XXII, 122; cf. XXIII,3 12 ; see also Hamann 11, 207)
Once again, our contention that Herder's Baconian naturalism came to him largely
through Hamann is confirmed. He had in fact developed such ideas long before his
feud against Kant, and had used them in the Journal to condemn those systems of
education which fail to train the child's senses and imagination before exercising
the abstract reason. As Haym says of this:
Die Polemik Bacons gegen die hohlen Abstraktionen, die Wort- und Streitweisheit der
scholastischen Philosophie, scheint aufs Padagogische iibertragen zu sein. (Haym I, 350)
And in a letter to Lavater in 1780, we find him invoking Bacon against Lavater,
who had tried to justify paraphrases, which Herder however treats as distortions
of original texts (Dobbek, p. 202, 3 November I 780).
I n the Metakritik, then, he repeatedly sets up Bacon against Kant (e.g. SW XXI,
41-2, I 14, 145, 325, etc.), and considers that Bacon's Novum organum, not Kant's
first Critique, shows the real nature of metaphysical problems (SW XXI, 39). And
if we require any further confirmation that he attacks Kant from a consciously
Baconian position, we need but recall how often he labels Kant's philosophy as
'Scholastik', reproducing Bacon's own earlier revolt against scholasticism.
I t is then ironical that the characteristic epistemological problems posed by
Bacon's naturalism led on, by a perfectly logical process, to Kant's critical philosophy, by way of Locke's sensationalism, Berkeley's idealism and Hume's scepticism.1
1
See Kuno
Fischer, Francis Bacon und seine Schule, 3. Aufl. (Heidelberg, 1904)~p p 332 ff,
2 74
Herder and Francis Bacon
Indeed, the seeds of the critical philosophy are to be found in Bacon's
celebrated scheme of idola, of modifications which the subject, the mind itself,
introduces by its own distinct nature into the objective data of experience. Yet when
Herder quotes Bacon's idola against Kant, the context shows that he regards Kant's
abstract ideas themselves as idola, not as definitions of the limits of possible knowledge. On the whole, Herder plays down this side of Bacon's philosophy, and was,
in his own speculations, all too frequent a victim of the idola, of premature judgments upon experience, as I have indicated elsewhere (Nisbet 11, 343). And
although he at one point (SM' XI, 58) seems to realize that Bacon's writings have
an order and discipline of their own, he does not concern himself with what
(relatively little) methodological discipline Bacon imposes upon induction. For
example, although he once quotes a passage in which Bacon defends experiments
(SW xxr, 42), he does not seem to have appreciated how important (planned)
experiments are in the Baconian method, and most of his own scientific theories
are built upon the experiments of others, with a large admixture of his own
speculations.
But many of the inadequacies of Herder's philosophical naturalism can be
matched by inadequacies in Bacon's cognate philosophy. Above all, both lack a
thorough critical epistemo1ogy.l Both likewise underestimate the function of
(planned) deduction, and also of mathematics, which Herder indeed uses symbolically, as in his so-called laws of historical development in the Ideen, but never
applies to verified quantities. Besides, in relation to experiments, we may notice
that both thinkers, in accepting simple induction as the means of discovering
natural laws, fail to realize that the primary role of experiment, or indeed of
observation in general, is 'to test theories, not to furnish them'.^ Nor do they fully
appreciate the function of scientific hypotheses, or realize that these, unlike their
inductive laws, need not always arise automatically out of previous sets of observations; their mode of origin is irrelevant in itself - only their ability to be tested by
observation, or their 'falsifiability' (as Sir Karl Popper3 calls it), is relevant.
The weaknesses inherent in the naturalistic side of Herder's thought are thus
similar to Bacon's. For a German, Herder was unusually hostile to bell-defined
logical systems, and this helps to explain why Bacon had a greater influence upon
him than upon any other major German thinker, including Hamann. Others
reacted to Bacon's radically inductive approach rather differently. For apart from
the extreme case of the chemist Justus von Liebig, who tried to undermine Bacon's
prestige as a thinker by attacking him as a man for his alleged immorality (Fischer,
p. 332 f.), there is the more familiar instance of Goethe, who uncompromisingly
condemns his methods. Goethe is indeed justified in criticizing Bacon for neglecting
'Wer kann sagen, daB er
the subjective factors in knowledge and e~perience:~
eine Neigung zur reinen Erfahrung habe? Was Baco dringend empfohlen hatte,
glaubte jeder zu tun, und wem gelang es?' But like many other critics, he tended to
magnify excessively Bacon's inductive approach, portraying him exclusively as a
.
1 See Fischer, p. 148 (on Bacon): '. . die Quellen der Sinneserkenntnis selbst untersucht er
;so erscheint die Sinneswahrnehmung doch als die letzte, zwar zu lauternde, aber unerforschte
nie
und ungeprufte Quelle aller wirklichen Erkenntnis.'
2 A. E. Taylor, Francis Bacon, British Academy Lecture (1926), p. 9.
3 Sir Karl Popper, The Logic of Scierltific Discouery (1g5g), pp. 58 ff.
4 Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe (1948-64), XII, 434.
...
H. B. NISBET
*75
champion of indiscriminate induction. He speaks disparagingly, in the Geschichte
der Farbenlehre in I 809 or I 8 I o, of 'die Verulamische Zerstreuungsmethode'1 and
of Bacon's 'grenzenlose Empirie' (p. 229), which must lead, he i;convinced, to a
chaos in learning. Thus he dismisses 'seine Forderungen, die alle nur nach der
Breite gehen, seine Methode, die nicht konstruktiv ist, sich nicht in sich selbst
abschlieBt, nicht einmal auf ein Ziel hinweist, sondern zum Vereinzeln AnlaB
gibt' (p. 228). He concludes (p. 236) :
Wer nicht gewahr werden kann, daR ein Fall oft tausende wert ist, und sie alle in sich
schlieBt, wer nicht das zu fassen und zu ehren imstande ist, was wir Urphanomene genannt
haben, der wird weder sich noch andern jemals etwas zur Freude und zum Nutzen fordern
konnen.
But it is worth pointing out that Bacon's thought is considerably more systematic
than either Herder, who admired his lack of system, or Goethe, who deplored it,
realized. His insistence upon universal induction does not mean, as many have
supposed, that he intended scientific observations to be indiscriminate, unselectively
accumulated by simple enumeration of instances. We need only think of his long
list, in the Novum organum, of 'Shining', 'Striking', or 'Prerogative Instances'
(Bacon IV, I 50 and I 55 f.), that is, of natural phenomena which, by their exceptional character, are more likely to reveal to us how natural laws operate than is
the great mass of undifferentiated observations we collect, for 'the Form [i.e. the
natural law] is found much more conspicuous and evident in some instances than
others' (Bacon IV, 150; cf. Goethe's statement 'daB ein Fall oft tausende wert ist').
But behind many German attacks on Bacon we may ultimately detect the timehonoured antagonism between German idealism and British empiricism. For even
Herder, who could simultaneously adopt conflicting positions with great facility,
found something wanting in Bacon's sober naturalism, and maintained 'bei Baco
ist nur Licht der Wahrheit, nicht Flamme, nicht Warme' (Dobbek, p. 199,
Herder to G. Muller, 18 October 1780). For Baconian naturalism is only one
ingredient of Herder's complex thought, as Haym justly notices:
Langst hatte sich in dieser Seele der Naturalismus der Baconischen Philosophie mit dem
Spiritualismus der deutschen, mit dem Interesse fiir das sittliche und intellektuelle Leben
begegnet. (Haym I, 346)
And while, for example, in a review of a work by Thorild in 1800, he supports
Bacon's ideal of quantitative scientific methods of studying nature against the
abstractions of 'sammtliche Transcendentalisten' (i.e. the Kantians), he proceeds
on the next page to take up the opposite position, this time against Thorild himself,
but again in the name of Bacon:
. . . so mochte Bacons Weg: "was ist da? was giebts?" erst strenge zu verfolgen seyn, ehe
man an das Gefundene oder Empfundene Maas legen und fragen kann: "wie viel giebts?
wie viel muR es geben?" (SW xx, 368-9)
He is here reading his own ambivalent attitudes into Bacon, for whom the quantitative 'wie viel' was far more important than the qualitative 'was'. Herder's
naturalism, we conclude, was not nearly so consistent as that of Bacon, from whom
it borrowed its philosophical justification.
I t is not surprising that Herder quotes long extracts from Bacon in his theological
1
Goethes Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe (1887-rgrg), 11. Abth. 111, 246.
Herder and Francis Bacon
writings, for, in his own views on religion, especially after his somewhat less
naturalistic religious phase in Biickeburg was over, he shows much in common
with the English scholar.
Aware ofihe hazards involved in applying his empirical methods wholesale to
religion, Bacon, in his theoretical pronouncements, usually declares (not unlike
Hume) that religion, whose principal guarantee is scriptural revelation, and the
rest of knowledge, which is built up by observation and induction, must be kept
strictly apart (Bacon IV, 20) ; otherwise, 'from this unwholesome mixture of things
human and divine there arises not only a fantastic philosophy but also an heretical
religion' (Bacon IV, 66). And to preserve this separation, he calls for a special
treatise, to be named Sophron, or the Legitimate Use of Human Reason in Divine Subjects
(Herder's Schulreden, curiously enough, were first published, in I 8 I o, under the
title Sophron). But although Herder, in his Theologische Briefe (SW XI, 82), quotes
Bacon's theory that religious and secular knowledge should be kept separate (once
again the passage had earlier been quoted by Hamann, cf Unger, p. 246), and
apparently approves of it, he was incapable of observing the distinction in practice
- and so, for that matter, was Bacon.
In the first place, they both applied religious conceptions to the natural world.
For despite his doctrine of incommensurability, Bacon once declared that the
natural world, as well as Scripture, is a divine revelation: it is 'the book of God's
works, and . . a kind of second Scripture' (Bacon IV, 261). In 1800, and on two
further occasions, Herder approvingly quotes, in translation, a similar passage from
Bacon (another of those previously quoted by Hamann, 11, 207), to the effect that
God's agency can be perceived throughout the created world:
.
. .. die Ideen des gottlichen Verstandes sind wahre Bezeichnungen des Schopfers auf den
Geschopfen, inwiefern sie der Materie durch zoalzre, ausgesuchte Lineamente eingedriickt und
in ihr beschrankt werden. Die Dinge selbst sind Wahrheit und Giite; die Werke durch sie und
mittels ihrer sind . . . wie Unterbfande gottlicher Wahrheit.
(SW XXII,1 22; cf, xxr, 42 and XXIII,31 I )
And although the divinely emanated 'Krafte' or animistic forces which Herder
postulates, especially in his Gott of 1787, are taken over chiefly from Leibniz's
monads, we find Bacon, in his Novum organum, propounding the similar doctrine
that 'everything tangible that we are acquainted with contains an invisible and
intangible spirit, which it wraps and clothes as with a garment' (Bacon IV, 195).
Like Herder (but before Newton), he believes (Bacon 111, 731) that such forces or
'spirits' can act at a distance, and he at times comes near to that conception of
universal animism to which Herder was so attached, declaring that 'it is certain
that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet they have perception'
(cf. Taylor, p. 16; also SW VIII, 264). And again, while Herder, in his Auch eine
Philosophie, maintains that history manifests a divine providence, which, however,
is only imperfectly visible to man within his (necessarilylimited) historical situation,
Bacon, in a passage quoted by Herder in I 781, appeals for a 'History of Providence'
(Bacon IV, 3 13), for (in Herder's German translation) 'obgleich die Rathschlage
Gottes unerforschlich den Menschen sind . . , so sind sie doch zuweilen mit so
groBen Buchstaben angezeichnet, daB auch der Voriiberlaufende sie lese' (SW XI,
95). In calling, like Bacon, for a 'Geschichte der Erfindungen' (in 1785), he likewise maintains that such a history would show 'die Regierung eines hohern
Schicksals' (SW XIII,368 (Ideen)).And just as he never doubts that we can conclude
.
H. B. NISBET
*77
from the workings of nature that God exists as a first cause, Bacon also holds that
such an argument from natural theology 'suffices to refute and convince Atheism'
(Bacon IV, 94I ) .
From all this, we might well expect that both Bacon and Herder would be eager
to discern purposes in nature; yet Bacon several times condemns those who assume
in nature final causes, 'which have relation clearly to the nature of man rather
than to the nature of the universe; and from this source have strangely defiled
philosophy' (Bacon IV, 57; cf. 1 2 0 and 3 6 4 , and Herder, in 1787 (SW XIV, 145
and 202), rejects them in theory, although he had often used teleological arguments
in practice, and indeed uses them again against Kant in the feud during his last
years (e.g. SW XXI, 238). However, we find that Bacon adopts exactly the same sort
of ambivalent approach as Herder does. Having rejected final causes in theory, he
says in his essay Of A t h m that they are a valid argument for convincing atheists
that God exists (Bacon 111, 413). This ambivalence is closely parallel to Herder's
attitude in the first two (or scientific) parts of his major work, the Ideen. Here he
employs an 'immanent teleology', whereby he explains the same events in terms of
both efficient and final causes, in the belief that the two are not mutually exclusive,
and that even if we have explained an event by efficient causes, we may still add a
teleological explanation. Bacon's opinion is the same when he says of the two types
of cause 'if they be kept within their proper bounds, men are extremely deceived
if they think that there is any enmity or repugnancy at all between the two' (Bacon
IV, 364). The similarity is worthy of notice, even if Herder's ideas on teleology owe
more to Leibniz than to Bacon; yet even Leibniz himself greatly admired Bacon's
philosophy. Thus, just as it is thoroughly characteristic of Herder to try to reconcile
conflicting modes of explanation, and even to adopt conflicting positions simultaneously, we may note with Hoffding that 'Bacon's doctrine of faith and knowledge
. . bears upon it the very evident stamp of compromise'.l
However, just as both thinkers were prepared to use religious criteria in studying
the natural world, so also were they prepared to introduce naturalistic ones into
theology. Except in his more religious phase in Biickeburg, Herder either rejects,
explains away, or remains sceptical towards miracles, and Bacon declares that
miracles are impossible in nature and advises us to doubt all religious reports of
prodigies (Bacon IV, 168-9). He never, on the other hand, directly doubts the
authenticity of scriptural miracles, although Herder frequently explains these
away in natural terms, as with the miracle of Pentecost (e.g. SW VII, 470; cf. also
the later Christliche Schrqten). Herder quotes Bacon's following words (in translation)
with apparent agreement: 'Christus zeigte seine Macht mehr durch Wahrheit, als
durch Wunder: er bezwang mehr die Unwissenheit als die Natur' (SW x, 401).
And in the same year (1781) he gives in translation these further words from the
De augmentis on theology:
Sie besteht also aus der heiligen Geschichte, aus gottlicher Poesie, wie 2.E. die Parabeln, und
aus einer ewigen Philosophie, welches ihre Pflichten und Lehren sind. (SW XI,81)
.
This division applies very well to the theology of Herder's mature and later periods,
when he is interested in the scriptures as a historical commentary upon Hebrew
and Hellenistic society, as a set of documents of great poetic beauty (cf. his Vom
1
H . Hoffding, A History of Modem Philosophy, translated b y B. E. Meyer, 2 vols. ('goo), I, 205.
2 78
Herder and Francis Bacon
Geist der ebruischen Poesie), and as a repository of moral doctrines of value to us in
our pursuit of 'Humanitat'.
There are pronouncedly materialistic traits in the philosophies of both thinkers,
as in Herder's fourth Kritisches Waldchen of I 769 with its theory of the 'materielle
Seele' (SW IV, 105), and in Bacon's predilection for Democritus and Lucretius
(cf. Fischer, p. 180). Then in the Ideen, Herder quotes a summary of a few of
Bacon's remarks in support of his own theory of environmental determinism
(SW XIII,272). And despite those words cited above on spirit and perception in all
natural entities, Bacon usually upheld a mechanistic theory of the universe,
believing 'that all human skill can really effect in nature is to displace bodies, to
move them to and from one another' (Taylor, p. I 2). Mechanistic ideas of this
kind were repugnant to Herder, however; he was too attached to his all-pervading
'Krafte', which have so many associations for him, sometimes appearing, as in
the Ideen, both with ~naterialisticand with spiritualistic or vitalistic overtones, but
always conveying the message that nature is-not dead and soulless, as the mechanists believed. Bacon's conception is nearer to that of a 'geistlose, mechanische,
blind wirkende Natur', as Kuno Fischer observes (pp. 318-19).
On the whole, Bacon separated theology and secular knowledge more consistently than did Herder, whose whole ambition was to reconcile the two. Herder's
efforts at reconciliation, in his mature and later periods, resulted, as with so many
adherents of natural theology, in an increasingly secularized religion, so that he
applied standards associated with religion, for example teleology, less and less
frequently to the natural world. I t is significant that he regularly quotes Bacon's
words on religion, often at considerable length. For Bacon is one of the greatest
originators of that movement in protestant thought which, setting out from
an uneasy compromise, bestowed more and more attention upon nature and
natural r d ~ i ~ i o nopposed
to revelation, and it is highly probable that he helped
is
to foster the same tendency in Herder's personal develo~ment.It is truly ironical
that it was the mystic Hakann who firs't introduced Hkrder to Bacon, & thinker
who, as Fischer says (p. 301), clearly prepares the way for the deistic beliefs
of the eighteenth century, and whose ideas Blake could describe as 'good advice
for Satan's Kingdom'.l
Amonp" the numerous scattered echoes of Bacon's ideas, upon all branches of
learning, in Herder's works, and the long extracts from Bacon's writings, there are
many whicli concern matters of detail, such as the origins of Freemasonry (SW
xv, 64-7 and 74)' or are simply introduced, out of context, to reinforce ideas which
are Herder's own, and owe little to Bacon himself. Yet there is one further topic in
which Bacon's influence is especially marked: this is the theme of human history,
particularly of the history of science and of man's growing mastery over nature.
In his ideas concerning the natural world, Herder, with his dynamic forces, his
preoccupation with becoming rather than with being, and what has in general
been called his 'Entwicklungsgedai~ke',has already something in common with
Bacon, who appealed to men to study nature as nature works, and not in static,
isolated products :
,
.
For it is strange how careless men are in this matter; for they study nature only by fits and
intervals, and when bodies are finished and completed, not while she is at work upon them.
(Bacon IV, 201)
1
See Basil Willey, The Seuenteenth Century Background
( I 934),
p.
I 0.
H. B. NISBET
* 79
Bacon has rightly been called 'one of the pioneers of historical science',l for,
like Herder, he is as much concerned with the dynamic in human affairs as with
changes in the natural world. We have already noticed how Bacon's ideas encouraged the young Herder to formulate plans towards a universal history of
human knowledge. He also found Bacon's notions on history in the wider sense
congenial, as his long extracts from Bacon on various branches of history show
(e.g. SW XI, 94 ff., and XXIII,219 ff.). For example, Bacon, like Herder, criticizes
pragmatic or moralizing histories; Herder indeed quotes a passage containing his
objections (SW XI, 94). More important still, the following words of Bacon calling
for a new civil history and quoted by Herder in German, are quite in Herder's
spirit, in the desire they express to savour the past as something immediate and
real, and to enter into the spirit of bygone ages and writers:
Die Materialien nehme man nicht von Kritikern, sondern aus den vornehmsten Biichern
jeder Zeit, koste ihren Inhalt, ihren Styl, ihre hfethode, und ruffe den Genius der Zeit
[Bacon's original Latin reads "Genius illius temkoris Literarius" - Herder omits the last
word - cf. his own "Zeitgeist"], wie durch eine Beschworung von den Todten hervor.
(SW XI, 95)
And while Herder, in his Auch eine Philosophie of I 774, calls the ancient Greek world
the 'Jiinglingszeit' of human history (STY i ,494), ~ a i o calls
n the Greek wisdom 'the
boyhood of knowledge' (Bacon IV, 14), and again, while Herder, in his first collection of Fragmente and in his Auch eine Philosophie, applying the analogy of the ages
of man to language and to European civilization respectively, implies that their
old age falls in modern times, Bacon writes in his JVovum organum:
For the old age of the world is to be accounted the true antiquity; and this is the attribute
of our own times, not of that earlier age of the world in which the ancients lived.
(Bacon IV,82)
But these remarks of the two writers on the ages of man are worthy of attention
not because of their apparent similarity, but because of the fundamental difference
they conceal. For the young Herder, the 'Jiinglingszeit' of a culture, or even of
mankind, has a positive significance, whereas 'old age' implies atrophy and
decadence. With Bacon, on the contrary, the 'boyhood' of knowledge and human
aspirations has a pejorative sense, and he considers that the 'modern antiquity'
is in every way superior to earlier times. Thus, while the young Herder teaches
either a historical relativism, treating every age as equally valuable, or a cyclic
doctrine of recurrent cultural blossoming and decline, and at all events vehemently
opposes the current eighteenth-century credo of progress, Bacon's whole gospel is
one of optimism and faith that mankind will progress to ever greater heights of
knowledge and of mastery over nature.
Bacon's belief in progress originates from his studies of the history of technology
and applied science, which demonstrates that man must acquire ever greater
control over his environment. Herder, even in his Auch eine Philosophie, shares
Bacon's interest in the history of technology, but he does not arrive at the same
optimistic conclusions. Instead, he traces much of the 'mechanization' he then
deplored in the modern centralized state (such as Prussia) to the spread of
mechanical techniques, so that the masses lose contact with the more 'natural'
existence they formerly enjoyed:
1
Benjamin Farrington, Francis Bacon, Philosopher of Industrial Science (New York, 1g4g), p. 45.
280
Herder and Francis Bacon
GewiBe Tugenden der Winenschaft, des Krieges, des Biirgerlichen Lebens, der Schiffahrt,
der Regierung - man brauchte sie nicht mehr: es ward Maschiene, und die Maschiene
regiert nur Einer. (SW v, 534)
Thus in this work, so far as technological progress is concerned, Herder displays
more of Rousseau's pessimism than of Bacon's optimism. But even in his Ideen, he
points out that while there are few inventors, the benefits of the advanced civilization they help to create are thoughtlessly enjoyed by masses who have no claim to
be called civilized themselves (SW XIII, 372-4 and 370). He seems to be deliberately
qualifying Bacon's theory that the mechanical arts create the difference between
civilization and barbarism (Bacon IV, I 14).
But as his mature period begins, Herder gradually takes a more optimistic view
of technological progress, closer to that of Bacon. In I 78 I, he praises technological
subjects for their utility and freedom from academic controversy, saying 'Sie sind
der Wald, der immer griinet' (SW IX, 406). Bacon had likewise declared of the
mechanical arts that they have 'in them some breath of life, are continually
growing and becoming more perfect' (Bacon IV, 14). Then in the Ideen, Herder
appeals, like Bacon, for a history of inventions:
. . so ware vielmehr eine Geschichte der Erjindungen das lehrreiche Werk, das die Gotter und
Genien des Menschengeschlechts ihren Nachkommen zum ewigen Muster machte.
(SW XIII,368)
.
Moreover, unlike Goethe, he came to agree with Bacon that instrumental aids to
perception (such as the telescope and microscope) are entirely a benefit to mankind
(e.g. SW XXVIII,367). And in the Ideen, he moderates his earlier pessimism, saying
that all inventions, even those such as gunpowder, must eventually produce
auspicious results, though their immediate application may be harmful, and 'so
arbeitet sich auch in den Kraften des Menschen der iibertreibende Misbrauch mit
der Zeit zum guten Gebrauch um' (SW XIV,490; cf. 241-3). For Herder, therefore, mechanical inventions can produce either good or bad results, depending on
the way in which and the conditions within which they are applied. This balanced
attitude is a distinct advance beyond Bacon's one-sided, unswerving optimism.
In points of detail, there are many further signs, which need not be discussed
here, of Bacon's influence upon Herder's notions of technology.1 In general, it
may be noticed that both believed that great inventions usually come about by
~ h a n c e and
, ~ while Bacon had considered technological discovery as the greatest
single factor in human history, Herder, in 1797, lists inventions and 'Revolutionen
der Erde' (presumably great geological upheavals) as the mainsprings of historical
change, and in 1774, as Pascal has noticed, he treats major inventions and the
greatest historical occurrences as equally i m p ~ r t a n t Thus
.~
the ideas of the two
thinkers on the significance (if not always on the effects) of technology in human
history are comparable, and no single influence upon Herder's opinions in this
matter is more easily verifiable than that of Bacon.
The further Herder distanced himself from the religious ideals of his Buckeburg
period, the more the influence of Bacon on his conception of human development
1 See, for example, SW v, 533 and XIV,
490: cf. Bacon
and
2
111, 163.
SW VIII,472 and XIII,368 etc.: cf. Bacon IV,48.
IV,I 14;also SW IV,351 : cf. Bacon IV,234
3 Roy Pascal, 'Herder and the Scottish Historical School', Publications of the En,clisl~Goethe Society,
'4 (1938-91, 38.
H. B. NISBET
28 I
asserted itself. Herder's great theme is man, with his abilities, his historical destiny,
and his place in nature, in the cosmos. And while in Buckeburg he had more
insistently emphasized the divine in nature, in a way which at times recalls
Hamann's mysticism, he subsequently dwells more and more upon nature in
relation to man as a species, and less in relation to the deity or to man as an emotive
individual or inspired 'Genie'. He writes in I 781 :
Wenn der menschliche Geist in Etwas den Funken seiner Gottahnlichkeit spiirt, so ists in
Gedanken, womit er Himmel und Erde umfasset, die Sterne wagt, den Sonnenstral spaltet,
sich in die Geheimnisse der Tiefe wagt, die Korper theilt, die Gesetze der Natur errath und
die Unendlichkeit berechnet. (SW IX,351)
A religious value ('Gottahnlichkeit') is present here, but it is firmly implanted in
this world. And when, on the same page in his works, we find him explicitly
referring to Bacon, the inspiration behind the ideal becomes obvious. This, and
similar utterances in the ensuing years, displays an optimism and a form of humanism akin to that of the Renaissance, whose ideals in this respect Bacon fully shared.
From the 1780's onwards, Herder begins to proclaim the greatest of Bacon's
ideals, the hope and assurance that man will and must attain universal dominion
over nature, impressing his mark upon everything. As Barnard says, Herder
'accepted the Baconian notion that knowledge meant powerY.lHe indeed writes
in 1800:
Was ist durch Menschen bildbar? - Alles. Die Natur, die menschliche Gesellschaft, die
Menschheit . . . Wer wagts die Grenzen zu bestimmen, wie weit die Natur und zwar Alles
in ihr cultivirt werden konne und werde? (SW XXII,314)
For man does not merely either study or defy nature. Like Bacon, Herder believes
that he should study it to use it:
Dan ihr den Elementen trotzet, ist
Nicht Euer groBtes Werk; zu andern sie,
Sie zu gebrauchen, ist das GroBere.
(SW XXIII, 25 I )
Nature as a whole, however, is more powerful than man. Bacon had written that
'the chain of causes cannot by any force be loosed or broken, nor can nature be
commanded except by being obeyed' (Bacon IV, 32). This paradox takes us to the
centre of Bacon's double-sided image of man and nature: on the one hand, man
is but 'the servant and interpreter of nature', and on the other, his aim is Promethean, being nothing less than 'the victory of art over nature' (Bacon IV, 105).
The same paradox is consciously taken up by Herder, who only colours it with
the pseudo-Spinozistic nature-pantheism of his treatise Gott, especially after I 787.
Nature is indeed greater than man, but is not man also the greatest being within
nature? Nature becomes vocal, constructive, and purposeful in a higher sense
through man alone, and 'der Mensch wird die Seele, das Herz, die Hand der
Natur' (SW XVIII,341). In these words from a discarded portion of the HumanitatsBride, Herder is freely rendering the opinions of his friend Knebel, as expressed
in an essay of 1788, written, as Suphan tells us, under the inspiration of 'BacoStudien' (SW XVIII,574). Tinged with nature-pantheism, the same idea recurs
often around this time, as in 1787, when Herder describes man as 'Priester der
Natur' (SW x x v ~ 312).
,
And in I 799, he translates Bacon's famous words on man
1
F. M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought (Oxford, 1965), p. 129.
282
Herder and Francis Bacon
as the 'servant and interpreter of nature', rendering them as 'der Mensch, ein
Diener der Natur und ihr Ausleger' (SW xxr, 42). Soon afterwards, he combines
the Baconian and pantheistic ideas in one sentence, exclaiming 'Mensch! du bist
der Ausleger der Natur, ihr Haushalter und Priester' (SW XXIII, 259 (Adrastea)).
And finally, in the Adrastea, on the same page on which another long extract from
Bacon begins, he gives us a poem of his own, in which all of the separate ideas
hitherto discussed, that of nature-pantheism and those of man as the 'Herz' of
nature, or as nature's interpreter, or as a Promethean Second Maker, are united
in verses of considerable poetic power:
Von Allem, was der Weltgeist regt und pflegt,
Hat Er Bedeutung Dir ins Herz gepragt.
. . . Dein innres Wort, Dein Ahnen dieser Spur,
Nennt Dich, 0 Mensch, Ausleger der Natur.
Ausleger nur? Nein! Deiner Regung Kraft Enthullt in Dir die hoh're Eigenschaft Das Triebwerk der Natur kannst Du allein, Ihr Meisterwerk, der Schopfung Schopfer seyn. Voll Mitgefuhl in Freuden wie in Schmerz Schlagt in Dir Ihr, der Schopfung, groBes Herz. Erkenne Dich! Auf Deiner weiten Flur Ward Deine Brust der Pulsschlag der Natur. Erfiillen sollst Du, was sie Dir zu thun verhiea, Einholen, was sie Dir zu thun verlieB In Geist und Liebe nur vollendet sie
Sich selbst, der Wesen Einklang, Harmonie.
(SW XXIII,3 10 (Adrastea))
From the I 780's onwards therefore, Herder's old ideal, first fired by Bacon, of a
Faust-like quest for universal knowledge, is transferred fiom the individual genius
of the Storm and Stress period to man viewed collectively, as a species, in his
strivings to control nature. Herder's faith in human progress, once heavily qualified,
now becomes truly enormous, and he affirms that it will eventually, as science
advances, become possible to explain everything that seems arbitrary in nature:
Die bemerkende Naturlehre, die noch so jung ist, wird in diesem allen einmal weit reichen,
so daB sie zuletzt jede blinde Willkiihr aus der Welt verbannen wird . . . (SW xvr, 557)
I n all this, there lives again the prodigious confidence and optimism of the Renaissance, and in particular of Francis Bacon, who hoped for no less than 'the enlarging
of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible' (Bacon 111,
156), and the extending of 'the power and the dominion of the human race itself
over the universe' (Bacon IV, I I 4).
If these words appear to us today as ironical, it is not because the ideal they
express seems in itself so far from being realized. I t is because in the intervening
centuries, we have discovered that, before he can control the universe, man must
learn to control himself.
These, then, are a few of the ways in which the great English savant resembled,
encouraged, and influenced Herder. Just where his direct influence begins and ends
can never be exactly determined. I t is sufficient if we can demonstrate that it was
indeed real and important, particularly in its effects upon the naturalistic side of
Herder's thought, although, in a mind so complex and comprehensive as that of
H. B. NISBET
283
Herder, many other sides were necessarily untouched by it. Nonetheless, this
influence deserves our attention, because until recently, the naturalistic elements in
Herder's thought have too often become obscured by the spiritualistic ones, just
as the older Aufklarer and rationalist has been overshadowed by the youthful
Stiirmer und Dranger or supposed irrationalist, and the student of Bacon and the
early Kant by the disciple of Hamann. This distorted perspective can be corrected
only if he is considered not only within the context of the German literary revival,
but also within that of European thought at large. For both in the history of
literature and in the history of ideas, the great revolutions, the supposed breaks
with the past, too often tend to obscure the continuity in all European literature
and thought; and besides, the legacy of nineteenth-century nationalism, despite
current developments in comparative literature, survives in many misleading
preconceptions which affect our attitude to past thinkers. Both Herder and Bacon
can be fully appreciated only in terms of European traditions, not merely in their
respective national contexts, and it is only in such terms that the influence of the
one upon the other becomes at all comprehensible.
H. B. NISBET
BRISTOL