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Herder’s Philosophy
Herder’s Philosophy
Michael N. Forster
1
3
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Editions xiii
Introduction1
Intellectual Life 2
Philosophical Style 5
General Program in Philosophy 10
1. Philosophy of Language 16
The Origin of Language 16
Three Fundamental Principles 18
Defending the First Two Principles 37
Defending the Third Principle 65
Some Further Doctrines 67
2. Hermeneutics 74
Introductory Remarks 74
An Overview 75
Influence 86
Some Advantages of Herder’s Theory 86
Genre 88
Einfühlung 100
The Inferiority of Gadamer’s Hermeneutics 110
Conclusion 116
3. Theory of Translation 117
Overview 117
Influence 134
Herder and Schleiermacher 135
4. Philosophical Contributions to the Birth of Linguistics and Anthropology 138
Contributions to the Birth of Linguistics 138
Contributions to the Birth of Anthropology 152
5. Philosophy of Mind 177
Mind and Body 177
Naturalizing Immortality 181
The Unity of the Mind 183
Sociality and Individuality 185
The Unconscious 187
Influence 189
viii Contents
6. Aesthetics 192
Founding Romanticism 192
Two Major Contributions 193
Reinventing Aesthetics 194
Historicizing Aesthetics 196
Interpreting Literature and Art 197
Evaluating Literature and Art 202
Beauty 205
Moral Education 207
Further Contributions 208
7. Moral Philosophy 210
Meta-ethics 210
First-order Morality 221
The Concept of Humanity 224
8. Philosophy of History 239
Teleology 239
Historicization 240
Historicism and Historiography 242
The Genetic Method 247
Historical Bildung 253
Some Further Historicist Ideas 255
The Problem of Skepticism 257
Concluding Remark 261
9. Political Philosophy 262
Domestic Politics 263
International Politics 266
Humanity vs. Human Rights 271
A Political Philosophy? 283
10. Philosophy of Religion 286
A Liberal and Enlightened Christianity 287
Neo-Spinozism 288
Interpreting the Bible 294
The Comparative Study of Religion and Myth 298
A Critical History of Christianity 298
11. Intellectual Influence 301
Some Noteworthy Examples of Influence 301
The Birth of German Romanticism and German Idealism 304
A Residual Puzzle 311
Select Bibliography 315

Index 325
Acknowledgments
This book attempts to give an overview of Herder’s philosophy. It is written out of a

conviction that his philosophy is of great value, that it has had enormous influence,
and that neither of these facts has yet been properly understood. It is also written out of
a painful awareness that the very richness of Herder’s ideas and the very extent of their
influence make it well nigh impossible for a book like this one to do more than scratch
the surface. Still, it will try.
The first half of the book (the Introduction and the chapters on philosophy of
language, hermeneutics, translation theory, and the birth of linguistics and anthro-
pology) is largely a more concise and user-friendly reworking of material from
two books that I published previously with Oxford University Press: After Herder:
Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (2010) and German Philosophy of
Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (2011). The second half of the book
(the chapters on philosophy of mind, aesthetics, moral philosophy, philosophy of
history, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and intellectual influence)
mostly consists of new material.
I have incurred many deep intellectual debts in connection with this project that
I would like to acknowledge here. Some of these reach back to my undergraduate
education at Oxford, where I learned much about German philosophy from the late
Patrick Gardiner, Peter Hacker, Alan Ryan, the late Peter Strawson, Charles Taylor, and
Ralph Walker. Other debts are to people from whom I learned as a graduate student at
Princeton University: especially, the late Michael Frede, Raymond Geuss, Saul Kripke,
and the late Richard Rorty. Yet other debts were incurred during twenty-eight years
of full-time teaching at the University of Chicago. Some of these debts are to former
colleagues there—including the late Arthur Adkins, Dan Brudney, the late Ted Cohen,
Arnold Davidson, Dan Garber, Charles Larmore, Jonathan Lear, Brian Leiter, the
late Leonard Linsky, Yitzhak Melamed, the late Ian Mueller, Martha Nussbaum, Bob
Richards, Howard Stein, Lina Steiner, Josef Stern, the late George Stocking, and Bill
Tait. Others are to former students—including Stephen Engstrom, Susan Hahn, Jim
Kreines, Sheela Kumar, Alison Laywine, Alyssa Luboff, Stephen Menn, Nathana
O’Brien, Gregg Osborne, Erich Reck, Tim Rosenkoetter, David Sussman, and Rachel
Zuckert. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to colleagues in Germany with whom
I have worked closely over the years in Heidelberg, Bonn, and Jena. These include
Hans-Friedrich Fulda, Markus Gabriel, Wolfram Hogrebe, Guido Kreis, Rainer
Schaefer, François Thomas, Klaus Vieweg, and Wolfgang Welsch. Other people who
have contributed to the development of this project in various ways and whom I would
like to thank include: Karl Ameriks, Andreas Arndt, Jeffrey Barash, Fred Beiser,
x Acknowledgments
Christian Berner, Anne Birien, Paul Boghossian, Rich Booher, Bob Brandom, Horst
Bredekamp, the late Rüdiger Bubner, Stefanie Buchenau, Nigel DeSouza, Manuel
Dries, Thomas Erikson, Eckhart Förster, Kristin Gjesdal, Hanjo Glock, Marion Heinz,
Rolf-Peter Horstmann, John Hyman, Michael Inwood, Mark Johnston, Vasso Kindi,
John McDowell, Steffen Mehlich, Ernest Menze, Dalia Nassar, Robert Norton, Michael
Rosen, Fred Rush, Richard Schacht, Hans Sluga, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Jürgen
Trabant, Stelios Virvidakis, Anik Waldow, Michael Williams, Claudia Wirsing, Allen
Wood, and John Zammito.
Among institutions, I owe large debts of thanks to the University of Chicago where
I have taught for over thirty years (formerly full-time, now as a visitor); Bonn University,
where I have worked full-time since 2013; and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung,
whose generous award of an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship to me in 2013 has
helped me to complete this project.
In addition, colleagues at the following institutions contributed to this project by
inviting me to present parts of it as talks and giving me the benefit of their feedback:
the Academy of the Sciences in Moscow, the APA Central Division, the APA Eastern
Division, the Aristotle University in Salonica, the University of Athens, the Berlin-
Brandenburg Academy of the Sciences, the Bildakt-Kolleg of the Humboldt University,
Bonn University, the University of Brussels, the University of California at Berkeley,
Cambridge University, The University of Chicago, Columbia University, the University
of Crete, Drew University, Eikones in Basel, the University of Georgia, Halle University,
Harvard University, the Humanities Institute of Osaka, the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, the Institut français in Bonn, the Internationale Hegel Gesellschaft,
the Internationale Hegel Vereinigung, the International Society for Nietzsche Studies,
Istanbul University, James Madison University, Jena University, Johns Hopkins University,
the University of Leuven, the Lomonossov University in Moscow, the University of
London, McGill University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, New York
University, the Nietzsche Gesellschaft, the University of Notre Dame, Oslo University,
Oxford University, the Paris Center of the University of Chicago, the University of
Paris at Nanterre, the University of Patras, the Philosophy Department of the Humboldt
University, the University of Poitiers, Princeton University, Renmin University in
Beijing, Sydney University, Temple University, Toulouse University, Warsaw University,
the University of Washington in Seattle, the University of Western Ontario, and the
Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
I also owe a debt of thanks to the many presses and journals that have published
work of mine that eventually developed into this book. They are too numerous to list
here individually, but their names can be found in the notes and bibliography of this
volume and in my previous publications on Herder.
I would also like to thank Oxford University Press and especially its Philosophy
editor Peter Momtchiloff for suggesting this project to me in the first place and for
helping me to bring it to completion. Peter’s encouragement and advice throughout
the process were invaluable.
Acknowledgments xi
I would also like to thank two anonymous readers for the Press who contributed
valuable encouragement and helpful suggestions as the project was approaching its
final draft.
Last but not least I would also like to thank my family and loved ones for their love,
support, and patience during the many years of work that it took to complete this
project: my daughter Alya, my former wife Noha, my parents Michael and the late
Kathleen Forster, and Paola Dobelli (who embodies the Herderian values of care for all
humankind and compassion towards individuals as perfectly as anyone I know, and to
whom this book is dedicated).
Editions
Two German editions of Herder’s works have been used in this volume:
Johann Gottfried Herder Sämtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan et al. (Berlin: Weidmann,
1877–). Abbreviated as S followed by volume and page number, e.g. S5:261.
Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, ed. U. Gaier et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher
Klassiker Verlag, 1985–). Abbreviated as G followed by volume and page number,
e.g. G2:321.
In addition, the following two English translations are cited frequently:
Herder: Philosophical Writings, ed. and tr. M.N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002). Abbreviated as HPW.
Selected Writings on Aesthetics, ed. and tr. G. Moore (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006). Abbreviated as SWA.
(Because I have worked from the German texts throughout, translations in the present
book sometimes differ from those in these two volumes when they are cited, without
specific notice being given.)
Introduction
This book is an exploration of the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803).

The restriction of the book’s focus to Herder’s philosophy is non-trivial, since he was
also active in several other fields, including literature and theology. The book focuses
on topics rather than on texts—in part because Herder usually in a given text runs
together treatments of many different topics belonging to several different disciplines,
and in part because his treatment of a given philosophical topic is usually spread over a
number of texts. Since Herder’s treatments of philosophical topics are extensive, uneven
in quality, and sometimes inconsistent, the presentation of them given here is more
selective and reconstructive than would be necessary for some other philosophers.
In particular, certain strands of his thought that are not particularly original or prom-
ising are given rather short shrift. Discussion of the voluminous secondary literature
on Herder is also kept to a minimum, partly because much of it is not especially good,
partly because discussion of it would only be of interest to a few specialists.
Herder is a philosopher of the very first importance. This judgment largely turns
on the intrinsic quality of his ideas, of which the present book will try to give an
impression. In order to do so it will focus on the areas in which he made his greatest
philosophical contributions: philosophy of language, hermeneutics, the theory of
translation, the philosophical foundations of linguistics and anthropology, philosophy
of mind, aesthetics, moral philosophy, philosophy of history, political philosophy, and
philosophy of religion.
But another aspect of Herder’s great importance as a philosopher lies in his intel-
lectual influence. This has been immense (far greater than is usually realized). For
example, Hegel’s philosophy turns out to be largely an elaborate systematic develop-
ment of Herder’s ideas (concerning language, the mind, history, and God). So too does
Schleiermacher’s (concerning language, interpretation, translation, the mind, art,
and God). Nietzsche is deeply influenced by Herder as well (concerning language, the
mind, history, and moral values). So too is Dilthey (concerning history). Even John
Stuart Mill has important debts to Herder (in his liberal political philosophy). And just
beyond philosophy, Goethe was transformed from being merely a talented but rather
conventional poet into the great artist and thinker he eventually became largely
through the early and sustained impact on him of Herder’s ideas.
Indeed, Herder can claim to have supplied the philosophical foundations for whole
disciplines that we now take for granted. For example, it was mainly Herder (not, as
2 Introduction
has often been supposed, Hamann) who established certain fundamental ideas
concerning a dependence of thought on language that underpin modern philosophy
of language. It was Herder who, through those same ideas, through his recognition
of deep variations in language and thought across historical periods and cultures,
including deep variations in grammar, through his strictly empirical approach to the
investigation of languages, and in other ways, inspired Friedrich Schlegel and Wilhelm
von Humboldt to found modern linguistics. It was Herder who developed the modern
theory of interpretation, or “hermeneutics,” in ways that would subsequently be taken
over by Schleiermacher and then by the latter’s pupil August Boeckh. It was Herder
who, by doing so, made a crucial contribution to establishing the methodological
foundations of nineteenth-century German classical scholarship (which rested on the
Schleiermacher–Boeckh methodology), and hence of modern classical scholarship
more generally. It was Herder who did more than anyone else to establish both the
general conception and the interpretive methodology of our modern discipline of
cultural anthropology. It was Herder who did more than anyone else to establish the
general conception and the methodology of the modern discipline of comparative
literature (largely via his influence on Goethe, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Friedrich
Christian Diez). It was Herder who made some of the most important contributions
towards establishing modern art history. And finally, it was also Herder who made
some of the most essential contributions to the progress of modern biblical scholarship.
The present book will touch on all of these contributions and more.
Intellectual Life
It seems appropriate to begin this book with a brief overview of Herder’s life, especially
his intellectual life. Who was Herder?
He was born in Mohrungen in East Prussia in 1744. His father was a schoolteacher.
His family was caring but poor and deeply religious (Lutheran). He was by nature a
bookish loner. Among the negative features of his early life in Mohrungen was the
heavy hand of Prussian military conscription that lay over the area. Among the posi-
tive features were the natural surroundings, in which he spent much of his free time.
In 1761 a local pastor with intellectual aspirations, Sebastian Friedrich Trescho, offered
him lodging in return for services as an amanuensis, which allowed him access to
Trescho’s library. Then in 1762 a generous Russian military surgeon who was passing
through the town was sufficiently impressed by Herder’s abilities to offer to take him to
Königsberg in East Prussia and pay for his education there, an offer that he accepted.
In 1762 he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he studied with Kant,
who accorded him special privileges, such as a waiver of fees, because of his unusual
intellectual abilities. At this period he also began a lifelong friendship with the irration
alist religious philosopher Hamann, who taught him English and inspired him with a
love of languages and literature, including Shakespeare.
introduction 3
In 1764 he left Königsberg to take up a schoolteaching position in the Baltic town of

Riga, a republic within the Russian Empire. Initially employed there as a schoolteacher,
following his ordination in the Lutheran church in 1767 he also became a pastor. While
in Riga he wrote the important, though fragmentary, programmatic essay How
Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People
[henceforth: How Philosophy Can Become] (1765). He also published his first major
work, the Fragments on Recent German Literature [henceforth: Fragments] (1767–8)—a
sort of selective commentary on a recently defunct literary journal titled Letters con-
cerning the Most Recent Literature that had been edited and written by some of the
leading thinkers of the period (including Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn) in which
he discussed aspects of the history of literature, tried to spur the improvement of
German literature, and dealt with issues in the philosophy of language and the theory
of translation. He subsequently went on to publish three parts of an important work on
literature and general aesthetics, the Critical Forests (1769) (an important fourth and
final part that was written at the same time was not published until the middle of the
nineteenth century). In this work he responded to the aesthetic theories of Lessing,
Winckelmann, and less well-known contemporaries, developed his own aesthetic
theory, introduced a number of important ideas concerning the interpretation of art
and literature, and (in the fourth part) formulated an important theory of perception.
In 1769 he resigned his position in Riga and travelled—initially by sea to France.
During his travels he wrote an ambitious and passionate Journal of My Travels in the
Year 1769 [henceforth: Travel Journal], which among other things offers further fascin
ating insights into his general philosophical program. While in France he met several
leading figures of the Enlightenment, including d’Alembert and Diderot. From France
he proceeded to Holland, and then eventually to Strasbourg, where in 1770 he met the
young Goethe (fact being stranger than fiction, in an inn called Zum Geist [lit. To the
Mind]!). He immediately had a powerful impact on Goethe—an impact that was
sustained and deepened as their relationship continued during the several decades
that followed. In 1771 he won a prize from the Berlin Academy for his best-known
work in the philosophy of language, the Treatise on the Origin of Language [henceforth:
Treatise] (published in 1772).
From 1771–6 he served as court preacher to the ruling house in Bückeburg, where
the cold militarism of the count who ruled the town, together with severe cultural
isolation, made him miserable (he wrote to the poet Gleim in 1772 that his existence
there was “a living death”).1 Mitigating this situation a little, in 1773 he married his
sweetheart Karoline Flachsland in Darmstadt, with whom he would stay happily mar-
ried until his death and who would bear him several children. During his period in
Bückeburg he published a number of important works, including a seminal essay on
1
Johann Gottfried Herder Briefe, ed. W. Dobbek and G. Arnold (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger,
1977), 2:198.
4 Introduction
the nature of tragedy, Shakespeare (1773), which appeared in a volume called On

German Character and Art to which Goethe and Justus Möser also contributed; and
his first, and arguably greatest, work on the philosophy of history, This Too a Philosophy
of History for the Formation of Humanity [henceforth: This Too] (1774). He also pub-
lished an interesting but much more questionable work on the Old Testament titled
Oldest Document of the Human Species (1774–6) in which he temporarily shifted away
from his usually enlightened stance on religion towards a sort of religious irrational-
ism more in the spirit of his friend Hamann.
After receiving an offer of a chair in theology at Göttingen University in 1775, which
turned sour when questions were raised about his orthodoxy and he refused to cooper
ate by answering them, in 1776, thanks to the influence of Goethe (who had gone
to Weimar the year before to serve in its government), he was appointed General
Superintendent of the Lutheran clergy in Weimar, a post that combined both religious
and educational functions and which he kept for the rest of his life. During this period
he published an important essay in the philosophy of mind, On the Cognition and
Sensation of the Human Soul [henceforth: On the Cognition and Sensation] (1778); an
important translation of, and commentary on, the Song of Solomon from the Old
Testament, Songs of Love (1778); a very influential collection of translations of poetry
from around the world (including ancient Greece and Rome, Germany, England,
Spain, Scotland, Italy, Scandinavia, the Baltic countries, and the Slavic countries) that
emphasized simple folk poetry, Popular Songs [Volkslieder] (1778–9); a seminal work
on the interpretation of the Old Testament, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–3);
his important and well-known later work on the philosophy of history, Ideas for the
Philosophy of History of Humanity [henceforth: Ideas] (1784–91) (which his former
teacher Kant reviewed condescendingly, thereby provoking a feud between them);
an important essay on the philosophy of religion, written in connection with the
Pantheism Controversy that had broken out in 1785 between Jacobi and Mendelssohn
concerning Spinozism, and conceived in the spirit of Spinoza’s monism, God: Some
Conversations (1787); a work written in response to the French Revolution (which
Herder welcomed), and largely concerned with aspects of political philosophy, the
Letters for the Advancement of Humanity [henceforth: Letters] (1793–7); a series of
Christian Writings (1794–8) that dealt with the interpretation of the New Testament;
and two works written in sharp opposition to Kant’s critical philosophy, A Metacritique
on the Critique of Pure Reason [henceforth: Metacritique] (1799) (directed against the
theoretical philosophy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason) and the Calligone (1800)
(directed against the aesthetics of Kant’s Critique of Judgment).
In addition to the intellectual feud with his former teacher Kant just alluded to, these
last years of Herder’s life also brought him many further difficulties and disappoint-
ments. His work was subjected to censorship (he had to rewrite the political chapter of
the Ideas no fewer than four times before it could pass the censor, who in this case was
none other than Goethe). He began to fall out with Goethe in 1793 for reasons that
were partly political (their opposite attitudes to the French Revolution), partly aesthetic
introduction 5
(their opposite views concerning classicism and l’art pour l’art), partly moral (Goethe’s
lifestyle and poetry, such as his erotic Roman Elegies), and partly more personal—
which eventually led to their complete rupture in 1795. In addition, he suffered from
social isolation (largely due to his radical political sympathies), overwork, ill health,
and financial difficulties. He died in 1803 (a year before his former teacher Kant).
Besides the works mentioned above, Herder also wrote many others over the course
of his career (the standard edition of his works, edited by Bernhard Suphan, contains
33 volumes). His earlier works are often his most brilliant. He himself wrote (in On
the Cognition and Sensation) that “the first uninhibited work of an author is . . . usually
his best; his bloom is unfolding, his soul still dawn.”2 Whether or not that is generally
true, it does arguably apply to Herder himself. However, his later works contain many
riches as well.
Philosophical Style
Before we consider the substance of Herder’s philosophy, it is appropriate to say
something about his philosophical style—by which I mean not only his general way of
writing philosophy but also his general way of doing it. This task is especially worth
undertaking because his philosophical style can easily be misunderstood, thereby
becoming an obstacle to the comprehension of his positions.
In certain ways Herder’s philosophical texts are easier to read than others from the
same period. For example, he avoids technical jargon, writes in a manner that is lively
and rich in examples rather than dry and abstract, and has no large, complex system
for the reader to keep track of. But his texts also have certain stylistic peculiarities that
can easily impede a proper appreciation of his thought. So it is important to be alerted
to these.
Some of these peculiarities concern his writing in a narrow sense. To begin with,
this often seems grammatically undisciplined and emotional—full of discontinued
sentences, ungrammaticalities, emphases,3 rhetorical questions, exclamation marks,
and so on—in ways that might perhaps be expected in casual speech but not in
philosophical texts.
This is quite intentional. Indeed, Herder sometimes deliberately “roughed up” mater-
ial in this direction between drafts (compare, for example, the 1775 and 1778 drafts of
On the Cognition and Sensation).
When writing in this way he is in fact often using rhetorical figures that can easily
look like mere carelessness to an untutored eye but which receive high literary sanc-
tion from classical sources and are being employed by him artfully. Examples of this
are anacoluthon (the deliberate failure to continue a grammatical construction that
2
HPW, p. 219 = G4:367; cf. S8:451–2.
3
In the translations from Herder contained in this volume, all emphases that are not explicitly identified
as additions by the translator are Herder’s own. His emphases have occasionally been omitted, though.
6 Introduction
has been begun by switching to another), aposiopeisis (breaking off a sentence and
leaving the reader to complete it in thought), zeugma (the use with two or more
substantives of a verb or adjective that strictly speaking only applies to one of them),
hypallage (the agreement of an adjective with another word than the one that it is really
meant to qualify), chiasmus (reversing the initial order in a comparison), hendiadys
(the use of a singular verb with a plural noun when this really only refers to one thing),
oxymoron (a seeming contradiction, usually masking a deeper consistency), anad-
iplosis (doubling a word or phrase), brachylogy (“shortening”), and hysteron proteron
(“later earlier”). Similarly, he often deliberately forms lists and combines verbal moods
and tenses in a variety of irregular ways in order to avoid monotony.
More importantly, he has several serious reasons for writing in an undisciplined-
looking and emotional way that is more reminiscent of casual speech than of conven-
tional academic prose. First, he hopes that this will make his writing more broadly
accessible and interesting to people—which is a decidedly non-trivial goal for him,
since he believes it to be an essential part of philosophy’s vocation to have a broad
social impact (see in this connection both the title and the content of How Philosophy
Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People).4 Second, he
believes that speech is not only historically earlier, but also more expressively funda-
mental and powerful, than writing (a position that he articulates most fully in the
Ideas), and he therefore wants to make his writing as much like speech as possible.5
Third, it is one of his central theses in the philosophy of mind that thought neither is
nor should be separate from volition, or affect, that types of thinking that aspire to
exclude affect are inherently distorting and inferior; in his view, standard academic
writing has this vice, whereas spontaneous speech, and writing that imitates it, avoid it.6
Fourth, he is opposed to any lexical or grammatical straightjacketing of language, any
slavish obedience to dictionaries and grammar books.7 In his view, such straightjack-
eting is inimical, not only to linguistic creativity and inventiveness, but also (much
worse), since thought is essentially dependent on and limited in its scope by language,
thereby to creativity and inventiveness in thought itself.8 Fifth, moreover it often serves
a dubious socio-political function, in that it both results from and supports a broader
submissiveness towards authority.9
4
For a discussion of this advantage, see S18:389. 5
See e.g. Letters, G7:19.
6
See in this connection On the Cognition and Sensation.
7
The closest Herder ever comes to approving of this is his proposal Idea for the First Patriotic Institute for
the Collective Mind of Germany (1787), which does envisage institutional improvement of the way the German
language is used (G9/2:565ff., cf. 707ff., 723ff.). However, even this seeming exception proves the rule: the
envisaged academy “will take the greatest care to avoid despotic laws concerning language; but all the more
strive by means of observations, suggestions, and critical rules to gradually provide our language with the beau-
tiful sure-footedness that in comparison with other languages she still so sorely lacks” (G9/2:572).
8
Concerning this position, see e.g. Travel Journal, S4:451–2.
9
See e.g. Letters, in HPW, p. 378 = G7:337: “And the language of Germans . . . should pull the victory
car of others like a conquered prisoner, and in the process still give itself airs in its clumsy empire- and
court-style? Throw it away, this oppressive finery, you matron squeezed in contrary to your will, and be
what you can be and formerly were: a language of reason, of force and truth.”
introduction 7
Another peculiarity of Herder’s philosophical texts that may initially pose an

obstacle to understanding them concerns not so much their writing style as their
philosophical style, in particular their unsystematic nature. This is again quite deliber-
ate. For Herder is skeptical about the value of systematicity in philosophy (an attitude
that had recently emerged in France with thinkers such as Condillac and d’Alembert as
well).10 Thus he already writes in about 1767:
It lies in the weakness of human nature to always want to set up a system; perhaps it also lies in
the weakness of human nature never to be able to set one up. He who shows this latter weakness
is more useful than the person who sets up three systems.11
He continues to make such statements against systematicity throughout his career,

for example in On the Cognition and Sensation, the Letters concerning the Study of
Theology [henceforth: Theological Letters] (1780–1), and the Ideas.12 And his hostility
to systematicity is also reflected in many of his titles: Fragments [on Recent German
Literature], Ideas [for the Philosophy of History of Humanity], Scattered Leaves, and so on.
Herder is especially hostile to the ambitious type of systematicity that had already
been aspired to in the tradition of Spinoza, Wolff, and Kant and which would soon be
aspired to again in the tradition of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel: roughly, the ideal of a
comprehensive philosophical theory whose parts exhibit some sort of strict overall
pattern of derivation. This type of systematicity was already very familiar to the young
Herder from Spinoza and Wolff, in whom it had taken the more specific form of a
series of logical deductions from a set of fundamental principles (Spinoza) or a single
fundamental principle (Wolff).
Herder has compelling reasons for this hostility. First, he is very skeptical that such
systematic designs can really be made to work, as opposed to merely creating the
illusion that they do so (see e.g. On the Cognition and Sensation). Second, he believes
that such system-building leads to a premature closure of inquiry, and especially to a
disregarding or distortion of new empirical evidence. For example, he writes in the
Theological Letters (1780–1):
Premature impudent system-addiction entirely damages true science. As soon as the youth’s
limbs and lineaments are developed, he no longer grows. As long as science is dispersed in
aphorisms and observations it can grow; fenced and enclosed round by method, it can perhaps
be elucidated, polished, made comfortable for use, but it no longer gains in content.13
Scrutiny of the systems of Spinoza, Wolff, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others
amply bears out both of these concerns.
10
See Condillac, Traité des systèmes (1749); d’Alembert, Discours préliminaire (1751).
11
G1:657. Cf. Travel Journal (1769), S4:443, 447, 478.
12
See e.g. a draft of the Ideas, S13:207: “I discount those authors who here and there tore a rag from
an often uncertain, misunderstood story, to decorate their system, the pet child of their own minds, with
it and to say all the more happily: ‘behold there a picture of humankind.’ Their way shall not be mine, for
I have no system to decorate.”
13
G9/1:490.
8 Introduction
Herder’s well-grounded hostility to this type of systematicity helped to establish

an important counter-tradition in German philosophy that subsequently included,
among others, Friedrich Schlegel, Nietzsche, the later Wittgenstein, and Adorno.
Nietzsche would memorably sum up the spirit of this counter-tradition in the aphor-
ism: “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”14
On the other hand, Herder is in favor of “systematicity” in a more modest sense.
For he accepts the ideal of a theory that is self-consistent and supported by good argu-
ments.15 His commitment to such an ideal marks an important methodological con-
trast with Hamann, whom he in particular already criticized for failing to give
arguments in an essay from 1765.16 Admittedly, Herder by no means always succeeds
in achieving this ideal.17 Interpreting him in a fruitful way consequently requires more
selectivity, reconstruction, and philosophical judgment than is the case with some
other philosophers.18 But his failure to do so is often more apparent than real.
Let us consider this situation in a little more detail. Concerning first consistency,
Herder sometimes explicitly commits himself to an ideal of consistency, for example in
the Metacritique.19 It must be conceded that he does not always live up to this ideal. For
example, in This Too he holds that different peoples’ moral values are fundamentally
discrepant and incommensurable, then in the Ideas he argues that all peoples at least
share the fundamental moral value of “humanity,” then finally in the Letters he goes
back and forth between those two incompatible positions. However, in many cases in
which he initially seems to be guilty of inconsistency he is really not. For (to begin with
the more obvious sort of case) he is often developing philosophical dialogues between
two or more opposing viewpoints, in which cases it would clearly be a mistake to
accuse him of inconsistency in any usual or pejorative sense of the term (see e.g. God:
Some Conversations and Letters). And (to turn to a less obvious sort of case) in many
other instances he is in effect still working in this dialogue-mode, only without bother-
ing to distribute the competing positions between different interlocutors explicitly,
and so is again really innocent of inconsistency (good examples of this occur in How
Philosophy Can Become and This Too).
14
F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufmann (London: Penguin,
1976), p. 470.
15
This may help to explain why he occasionally expresses a more positive attitude towards systematicity—
for example, in This Too and at God: Some Conversations, G4:683.
16
G1:38–9.
17
In this connection Charles Taylor has commented wisely that “deeply innovative thinkers don’t have
to be rigorous to be the originators of important ideas” (“The Importance of Herder,” in Isaiah Berlin:
A Celebration, ed. E. and A. Margalit [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991], p. 40). Incidentally,
the converse is true as well: thinkers can be extremely rigorous without originating any important ideas.
(Note for analytic philosophers.)
18
It is all too easy to simply present everything that Herder says on a topic—and thereby leave him look-
ing like a sort of inconsistent, or at best only superficially consistent, eclectic. It is also easy to be selective
but in a way that reflects poor philosophical judgment, for example by portraying him as fundamentally
committed to Christian religion, metaphysics, a priori inquiry, and universalism—and thereby again leave
him looking both unoriginal and mediocre. A recent handbook on Herder manages to combine both of
these vices.
19
S21:297.
introduction 9
Moreover, he has serious motives for using this method of (implicit) dialogue. First
(and most obviously), when he is dealing with religiously or politically delicate matters,
using dialogues permits him to communicate his views without quite stating them as
his own and therefore without inviting trouble from the authorities (this applies to
God: Some Conversations and the Letters, for example).20 But he also has some less
obvious, philosophically deeper motives. Thus, second, he takes over from the pre-
critical Kant an idea (ultimately inspired by ancient skepticism) that the best way for a
philosopher to pursue the truth is by setting contrary views on a subject into oppos-
ition with each other in order to advance towards, and hopefully attain, the truth
through their mutual testing and modification. (Kant recommended the use of such a
“zetetic” approach, as he called it following the ancient Pyrrhonists, in his Notice
concerning the Structure of Lectures in the Winter Semester 1765–1766 and then imple-
mented it in Dreams of a Spirit Seer, Illustrated Through Dreams of Metaphysics [1766].
Herder already read the latter work before its publication, and in a review he wrote of
it in 1766 remarks on its use of the method in question.21) Furthermore, third, Herder
also develops a more original variant of that idea on a socio-historical plane: analo-
gously, given the deeply fallible nature of human cognition, truth is an elusive com-
modity, and consequently the only way for humankind as a whole to attain it is through
an ongoing contest between opposing positions on issues, in the course of which the
best ones will eventually win out. (This idea is prominent in Dissertation on the
Reciprocal Influence of Government and the Sciences [1780] and in the Letters. It antici-
pates, and indirectly helped to inspire, a similar thesis of John Stuart Mill’s in On
Liberty.) This yields a further motive for the dialogue-method, even where it does not
lead Herder himself to any definite conclusion, in effect warranting the rhetorical
question, “And what does it matter to the cause of humankind and its discovery of the
truth whether those various opposing positions are advanced by different people or by
the same person?”
This explanation of many of Herder’s inconsistencies as merely apparent also helps
to diminish his culpability for the real inconsistencies that remain: these are to a con-
siderable extent merely cases in which an intrinsically defensible and valuable method
has got out of control.
Somewhat similarly, concerning arguments: Herder not only complained about
Hamann’s failure to give arguments,22 but also himself often lived up to the ideal of
20
Herder describes and thereby reveals this sort of motive in the course of discussing other authors in
God: Some Conversations: “In such dangerous matters [as philosophy of religion] a disputing dialectician
like Bayle or an ornamenting poet like Voltaire . . . has much advantage over the serious philosopher who
sets forth his propositions directly. The former always remain safer because they can say, ‘I only disputed,
only ornamented’; and yet they only have an all the more universal effect in this pleasant, ever changing
garb” (G4:685–6). Cf. E. Adler, Herder und die deutsche Aufklärung (Vienna: Europa, 1968), pp. 170, 190–5,
who makes the similar, though not identical, point that Herder’s inconsistencies often arise due to a conflict
between his intellectual views and his religious/political circumstances. Adler’s point is no doubt also true
to some extent.
21
S1:130. Cf. Herder’s defense of scholastic disputation in the Ideas, G6:885–6.
22
G1:38.
10 Introduction
providing them quite impressively. For example in the Fragments and the Treatise he
argues convincingly that a variety of different sorts of empirical evidence all converge
on the hypothesis that language is human in origin, and he complements this case with
equally cogent arguments against the contrary hypothesis that its origin is divine. And
concerning his key thesis in the philosophy of language that thought is essentially
dependent on and bounded by language, he not only argues for this on empirical
grounds, such as that children always acquire the two in step with each other, but also
seeks, and I think ultimately finds, a good conceptual argument for it.
The appearance that Herder neglects to give arguments is often merely an illusion
that results from the fact that he as a matter of principle declines to give arguments of
certain sorts. For example, he has a strong commitment to empiricism and against
apriorism in philosophy, which (while it does not exclude a priori, in particular
conceptual, arguments altogether, as we just saw) usually leads him to avoid giving
familiar sorts of a priori arguments in philosophy. And he also has a strong commit-
ment to sentimentalism in ethics, which leads him to refrain from offering familiar
sorts of cognitivist arguments in ethics.
General Program in Philosophy

The extent of Hamann’s influence on Herder’s thought has sometimes been greatly
exaggerated by the secondary literature (e.g. by Isaiah Berlin).23 But Kant’s influence
was early, fundamental, and enduring.24
However, the Kant who influenced Herder in this way was not the Kant of the three
Critiques (against whom Herder later engaged in the—rather unpleasant, distracting,
and ineffectual—public polemics of the Metacritique and the Calligone), but the
pre-critical Kant of the early and mid-1760s.25 Some of Kant’s key positions in the
1760s (sharply contrasting with the ones that he would adopt later during the critical
period) were: a Pyrrhonist-influenced skepticism about metaphysics; a form of
empiricism; and a Hume-influenced sentimentalism in ethics.26 Herder took over
these positions from Kant in the 1760s and retained them throughout his career.
23
Cf. Adler, Herder und die deutsche Aufklärung, pp. 63–7.
24
Concerning the relationship between the young Herder and the pre-critical Kant, cf. J. Zammito,
Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Modern Anthropology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001).
There has been a rather heated debate in the secondary literature about whether Herder should be seen as
an “irrationalist” or as part of the “Enlightenment” (in the Anglophone world, Isaiah Berlin is the leading
proponent of the former view, Robert Norton of the latter). Such a distinction seems to me too blunt a
conceptual tool, and Herder’s position too variegated and changing, for this debate to be very helpful in the
end. But insofar as it is a legitimate one, my remarks here concerning Herder’s greater indebtedness to Kant
than to Hamann imply that he is more an Enlightener than an irrationalist.
25
Cf. Adler, Herder und die deutsche Aufklärung, pp. 56–9.
26
For some further discussion of these positions, especially Kant’s early Pyrrhonist-influenced
skepticism about metaphysics, see M.N. Forster, Kant and Skepticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2008).
introduction 11
It should not be assumed that this debt to the early Kant is a debt to a philosophically
inferior Kant, though; a good case could be made for the very opposite.
Herder’s 1765 essay How Philosophy Can Become is a key text for understanding
both this debt to Kant and the general orientation of his philosophy as a whole.27
The essay was written under the strong influence of Kant, especially, it seems, Kant’s
Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766), which Kant already sent to Herder prior to its publica-
tion (“a sheet at a time,” as Herder reports).28
Herder’s essay answers a prize question that had been set by a society in Berne,
Switzerland: “How can the truths of philosophy become more universal and useful for
the benefit of the people?” This question was conceived in the spirit of the “popular
philosophy [Popularphilosophie]” that was competing with dry, scholastic school-
philosophy in the German-speaking world at the time. Kant himself tended to identify
with Popularphilosophie at this period, and Herder’s decision to answer this prize
question shows that he did so as well. However, in Herder’s case, unlike Kant’s, the
identification would last a lifetime. Philosophy should become relevant and useful for
the people as a whole—this is a fundamental ideal of Herder’s philosophy.
Largely in the service of this ideal, Herder’s essay argues in favor of two sharp turns
in philosophy, turns which would again remain fundamental to his position through-
out the rest of his career. Let us therefore consider them here (doing so with an eye
to certain ways in which he elaborates them in later texts).
The first of these turns consists in a rejection of traditional metaphysics, especially
of its concern with the supersensible, and closely follows an argument that Kant had
developed in Dreams of a Spirit Seer. Herder’s case is roughly as follows: (1) Traditional
metaphysics, by undertaking to transcend experience (or strictly speaking, a little
more broadly, “healthy understanding,” which includes, in addition to experience, or
empirical knowledge, also ordinary morality, intuitive logic, and mathematics), suc-
cumbs to the weakness that it generates contradictory claims that are supportable by
equally convincing arguments, and hence to the Pyrrhonian skeptical problem of an
equal plausibility on both sides of issues requiring a suspension of judgment about
them (“I am writing for Pyrrhonists,” Herder tells us).29 This had also been Kant’s most
fundamental objection to traditional metaphysics concerning the supersensible in
Dreams of a Spirit Seer. Another sort of objection that Kant had developed there had
assumed an empiricist theory of concepts and argued that the terms that supersensible
metaphysics uses lack the basis in experience that is required for meaningfulness, and
are therefore meaningless. Herder implies this sort of objection as well.30 Herder also
27
Another relatively early programmatic text that is illuminating for the general orientation of his
philosophy (though less so for his debt to Kant) is his Travel Journal from 1769. This text in particular
includes certain topics that are more or less absent from How Philosophy Can Become, such as political
philosophy and philosophy of history.
28
Herder Briefe, 2:259.
29
How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, pp. 3–4, 8, 16 = G1:104–5, 110, 118–20.
30
How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, p. 17 = G1:120–1. Herder’s own (quasi-)empiricist theory of
concepts, already reflected in his Essay on Being (1763–4), will be examined in Chapter 1. After How
12 Introduction
goes on to elaborate this point in an interesting way that goes beyond Kant, however:
the illusion of meaningfulness that is involved here largely arises because of the role of
language, which all-too-readily spins on, creating illusions of meaning, even after the
empirical conditions of meaningfulness have been left behind.31
(2) Traditional metaphysics concerning the supersensible is not only, for these
reasons, useless; it is also harmful. This is because it distracts its adherents from other
matters that should be their focus: nature and human society.32
(3) By contrast, experience (or again strictly speaking, a little more broadly, “healthy
understanding,” which also includes ordinary morality, intuitive logic, and mathematics)
is innocent of these problems.33 So philosophy should be based on, and kept continuous
with, this.34
Herder’s second sharp turn in philosophy concerns ethics. Here again he is indebted
to the pre-critical Kant, but he also goes somewhat further beyond him than in the case
of metaphysics. Herder’s basic claims are as follows: (1) Morality more fundamentally
consists in sentiments than in cognitions.35 This position is continuous with Kant’s in
Philosophy Can Become, Herder continues to deploy such a theory of concepts against metaphysics in the
Fragments, HPW, pp. 48–9 = G1:556–8; On the Cognition and Sensation; and the Metacritique.
31
See esp. Fragments, HPW, p. 49 = G1:557–8: we need “a negative philosophy [which asks] how far
human nature should really ascend in its ideas since it cannot ascend higher, and to what extent one should
express and explain oneself since one cannot express and explain oneself any further. How much one
would be able to sweep away here which we say without in the process thinking anything . . . , which we
want to say without being able to think it! A man who thought this negative philosophy into existence
would stand at the sphere of human cognition as though on a globe, and if he could not raise his head
above these limits and look around into open air, at least he would dare to thrust forth his hand and would
cry, ‘Here is emptiness and nothing!’ . . . If I am not mistaken, in that case ideas would creep away out of our
whole metaphysics, from ontology to natural theology, to which merely the words have given admission
and a false citizenship” (cf. Travel Journal, S4:372). Although this line of argument is not really anticipated
by Kant, it does have precedents in British Empiricism—especially in Bacon and Locke.
32
See How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, pp. 16–18 = G1:118–21.
33
It is no doubt clear enough how relying on experience can avoid certain of the problems just men-
tioned: those arising from concept-empiricism and the danger of a distraction from nature and society. But
what about the Pyrrhonian problem of an equal plausibility on both sides of issues, or more generally the
problem of the epistemic fallibility of judgments? Herder here follows the pre-critical Kant in supposing
that such problems do not really arise in the case of empirical judgments. However, much of the skeptical
tradition, from the ancient Pyrrhonists themselves to Descartes in the First Meditation, took a contrary
view. Does Herder have anything to say in response to it? He does imply answers at various points—for
example, in the Essay on Being (1763–4) that the more purely empirical a concept/phenomenon is, the
extreme case of this being the concept/phenomenon of being, the more certainly it can be known, and in
other places that God ensures that our experience broadly conforms to reality. But these answers are not
very compelling. There is therefore something of a gap in Herder’s theory here. However, even if he did not
himself fill it, it may well be fillable, and his methodological empiricism therefore justifiable.
34
Despite officially adopting this position, Herder himself during the 1760s and 1770s sometimes
engaged in metaphysics and then later on pursued such a project more publicly and ambitiously in God:
Some Conversations (1787). His way of justifying this, at least in God: Some Conversations, was essentially
to base the metaphysics in question on experience (this is one of his most striking points of disagreement
with Spinoza in the work). Such a project again has a pre-critical Kantian background, since this had basic-
ally been Kant’s own approach to metaphysics during the early 1760s.
35
How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, p. 13 = G1:115–16. Cf. This Too, HPW, pp. 278–80 = G4:18–19.
In This Too Herder usually uses the term Neigungen in this connection; later, in the Letters, 10th Collection
he usually uses the term Gesinnungen.
introduction 13
Dreams of a Spirit Seer, where it is indebted to British moral philosophy, especially

Hume.36 Neither Kant nor Herder explicitly gives much argument for it. However,
Hume had already done so, in particular developing the powerful (though not uncon-
tested) argument that the fact that moral judgment is intrinsically motivating, together
with the fact that cognition or reason itself is motivationally inert and only the senti-
ments or passions have the ability to motivate (that “reason is and ought only to be
the slave of the passions”), shows that moral judgment is based not on cognition but
on the sentiments. And that Herder has something very much like this argument in
mind can be seen from certain passages in This Too.37 In the same work he also devel-
ops a second line of argument in support of sentimentalism and against cognitivism,
namely that the various moral outlooks that have arisen over the course of history
can in each case be quite adequately explained in terms of social functions that they
serve, without any recourse to moral facts in addition. This second line of argument
makes Herder’s version of sentimentalism more sophisticated than Hume’s. So does a
further distinctive feature of his version of it: in works such as the Critical Forests and
On the Cognition and Sensation he acknowledges that cognition plays an important
role in morality as well. For instance, in the Critical Forests, he rejects crude forms of
sentimentalism that deny this (as Hume’s arguably did),38 instead holding that moral
sentiments—like other human sentiments—essentially involve conceptualization, judg-
ment, and rational inference.39
(2) Cognitivist theories of morality—as espoused at this period by Rationalists such
as Wolff and his followers, but also by many other philosophers before and since
(for example, Plato and the critical Kant)—are therefore based on a mistake, and are in
consequence useless as means of moral enlightenment or improvement.40
(3) But (and here Herder’s theory goes well beyond the pre-critical Kant’s), still worse
than that, they are actually harmful to morality. Why so? According to Herder, this is
because they weaken the moral sentiments on which morality really rests.41 In This Too
and On the Cognition and Sensation he goes on to identify a number of more specific
ways in which they do so: First, abstract theorizing weakens the sentiments generally,
and hence moral sentiments in particular.42 Second, the cognitivists’ theories—for
example, Plato’s theory that moral insight is a matter of knowing an otherworldly form
and then comparing people and their actions with it, Wolff ’s theory that it is a matter of
36
Herder’s debt for this moral sentimentalism to the pre-critical Kant and thereby to Hume can be seen
especially clearly from his detailed notes on Kant’s practical philosophy from 1762–4.
37
See esp. HPW, p. 320 = G4:65: “The philosophy of our century is supposed to cultivate [bilden]—what
else would that mean than awakening or strengthening the inclinations [Neigungen] through which man-
kind is made happy—and what a gulf for this to happen! Ideas actually only produce ideas . . . ”
38
Critical Forests, S4:5, 13–15, 35–6.
39
Critical Forests, S4:5, 35–6. Cf. On the Cognition and Sensation.
40
See e.g. How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, pp. 12–14 = G1:115–17. Cf. This Too, esp. HPW,
pp. 320–4 = G4:65–9.
41
See e.g. How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, p. 14 = G1:116–17. Cf. This Too.
42
See On the Cognition and Sensation and This Too. This is perhaps the least compelling of Herder’s
points.
14 Introduction
a theoretical insight concerning perfection, or (later on) the critical Kant’s theory that
it is a matter of discerning a sort of self-contradiction in maxims under the hypothesis
of their universalization—turn out to be so strikingly implausible that they bring
morality itself into disrepute, people reacting to them roughly along the lines, “If this is
the best that even the experts can say in explanation and justification of morality, then
morality must certainly be a sham, so I may as well ignore it and do as I please.”43 Third,
such theories distract people from recognizing, and then working to reinforce, the real
foundations of morality: not an imaginary theoretical insight of some sort, but a set of
causal mechanisms that inculcate and support the moral sentiments.44
(4) Accordingly, more constructively, Herder himself instead turns to discovering
and promoting just such a set of causal mechanisms. In How Philosophy Can Become he
mainly emphasizes certain forms of education45 and an emotive type of preaching.46
These are both activities that he later went on to theorize about at greater length—for
example, education in his Travel Journal (1769) and preaching in the Theological
Letters (1780–1), especially Letter 38—and which he would also spend a lifetime prac-
ticing. But these are only two parts of a considerably broader theory and practice of
moral pedagogy, or cultivating the moral sentiments, that he eventually developed
over the course of his career, in what became one of his most central, distinctive, and
consuming projects. The additional causal mechanisms that he identified and actively
supported included the influence of morally exemplary individuals (or role models),
the law, and literature (together with the other arts). His development of this whole
theory and practice of moral pedagogy was lifelong and tireless. (We shall consider it
in some more detail later.)
In sum, Herder’s basic approach to philosophy has deep roots in one that his teacher,
the pre-critical Kant, had developed in the mid-1760s. But, unlike Kant himself, Herder
always remained fundamentally faithful to it.
Herder also incurred several further important debts to the pre-critical Kant that
would endure a lifetime, two of which are especially worth mentioning here. In his
Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) Kant had argued against
Newton, who had held that while the laws of physics could explain the running of the
solar system, its origin could only be explained in terms of a divine act of creation, that
in fact not only its running but also its origin could be adequately explained in terms of
the laws of physics; but Kant had also argued that the fact that the laws of physics held
true at all itself required further explanation, and that God was indeed needed in order
to explain this fact. Herder—who later praised Kant’s book explicitly near the begin-
ning of the Ideas47—was deeply influenced by it from an early period, especially by its
43
See e.g. On the Cognition and Sensation.
44
How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, pp. 13–14, 26 = G1:115–17, 130. Cf. This Too.
45
How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, pp. 23–8 = G1:127–32.
46
How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, pp. 14, 26 = G1:116–17, 130.
47
Ideas, G6:21–2: Herder cites the book and says that it is “a text that has remained less well known than
its content deserves.” Cf. God: Some Conversations, G4:733–8.
introduction 15
subtle position concerning the laws of nature and God, its combination of a firm
insistence on the full explicability of nature in terms of natural laws with a conviction
that this very explicability of nature in terms of natural laws itself ultimately requires
explanation in terms of God.48 Accordingly, he himself from an early period applied
this position to various domains, for example to the question of the origin of language
in the Treatise and to the question of the nature of history in This Too.49 It is largely
because Herder’s philosophical positions normally have this clean two-part structure
that they can still have great relevance for us today despite their ultimate inclusion of a
belief in God which we are no longer in a position to share with him.
Finally, although the concept of “critique” is of course associated above all with the
later Kant of the three Critiques, the earlier Kant from whom Herder mainly learned
was already very much a critical thinker in the generic sense of someone who devel-
oped arguments that deeply challenged received positions in such areas as metaphys-
ics, religion, and politics in the interest of finding better ones. Herder took over this
feature of Kant’s approach from an early period, and indeed extended its range of
application. For example, he already applied it to literature and its theory in the
Fragments and to art and its theory in the (revealingly titled) Critical Forests, and he
subsequently retained it as a prominent feature of his approach throughout his career,
eventually even turning it against Kant himself in the Metacritique and the Calligone.50
Herder’s philosophy is by no means limited to the early Kant’s approaches, however.
For one thing, as we have just seen, he from the beginning developed them in some
novel ways. For another thing, he complemented them with a whole range of further
philosophical projects, including projects in the philosophy of language, hermeneut-
ics (i.e. the theory of interpretation), the theory of translation, the philosophical
foundations of linguistics and anthropology, the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, moral
philosophy, the philosophy of history, political philosophy, and the philosophy of
religion. The following chapters will consider each of these further projects in turn.
48
Cf. Adler, Herder und die deutsche Aufklärung, pp. 54–5; F.C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and
Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 193–4.
49
Although Herder during his Bückeburg period, 1771–6, temporarily tended to set this sort of good
intellectual hygiene aside in favor of a more abandoned religiosity, the two works just mentioned were to a
considerable extent spared that fate, the former because it was written at the very beginning of the period
in question, the latter because it realized a plan that Herder had already developed well before it (the essen-
tial conception of the project of This Too can already be found in his Travel Journal of 1769).
50
For a helpful account of Herder as a critical thinker, see R.E. Norton, “Herder as Critical
Contemporary,” in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. H. Adler and W. Koepke
(Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009).
1
Philosophy of Language
The Origin of Language

The Treatise on the Origin of Language from 1772 is Herder’s best-known work in the
philosophy of language by far. However, it is in certain respects both unrepresentative
and inferior compared to other works of his on the subject, such as the Fragments and
On the Cognition and Sensation, and should not monopolize attention.
The Treatise is mainly concerned with the question whether the origin of language
can be explained in purely natural, human terms or instead only in terms of a divine
source, as Johann Peter Süßmilch had recently argued in his Attempt at a Proof that the
First Language received Its Origin not from Man but solely from the Creator (presented
to the Berlin Academy in 1756, published in 1766).1 Herder had already discussed this
question a few years before the Treatise in the Fragments. In both works he argues in
support of the former position and against the latter; in his view, language’s origin can
be explained in purely natural, human terms.
Herder did not, as might be supposed, conceive this as a dispute between a religious
position and a secular one, however. Rather, he was working within the theoretical
framework that his teacher Kant had already established in his Universal Natural
History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), according to which (a) only explanations of
natural phenomena in terms of natural laws, not explanations of them in terms of
direct divine interventions, can really succeed in explaining them, and (b) it is the
former explanations, rather than the latter, that ultimately provide the best demonstra-
tion of God’s role in nature, God being required in order to account for the natural laws
themselves. Accordingly, Herder writes towards the end of the Treatise:
The higher origin, as pious as it may seem, is entirely irreligious; with each step it diminishes
God through the lowest, most imperfect anthropomorphisms. The human origin shows God in
the greatest light: His work, a human soul, creating and continuing to create a language through
itself because it is His work, a human soul. The human soul builds for itself this sense of reason
as a creator, as an image of His nature. The origin of language hence only becomes divine in a
worthy manner insofar as it is human.2
1
J.P. Süßmilch, Versuch eines Beweises, daß die erste Sprache ihren Ursprung nicht vom Menschen,
sondern allein vom Schöpfer erhalten habe (Berlin: Buchladen der Realschule, 1766).
2
HPW, p. 163 = G1:809; Herder’s emphasis.
philosophy of language 17
Still, our interest in Herder’s side of the argument today is of course likely to lie in its
compatibility with secularism.
Herder makes quite an impressive case for his naturalistic position. On the negative
side, he successfully undermines Süßmilch’s arguments for a direct divine origin. For
example, he points out that the extraordinary and beautiful complexity of languages,
to which Süßmilch had appealed in order to prove that language could only have come
from God, could very well have arisen gradually over time through the cumulative
contributions of many generations of human beings during the course of prehistory.
On the positive side, he also makes quite an impressive constructive case for the
claim that language’s origin was instead natural and human. His case is actually in
some ways more impressive in the Fragments than in the Treatise. In the Treatise it
tends to be both obscured by the polemics against Süßmilch and weakened by the fact
that Herder now supposes, implausibly, that he has discovered a sort of master argu-
ment that establishes the desired conclusion in one fell swoop: unlike other animals,
human beings of their very nature identify “characteristic marks [Merkmale]” (e.g. the
bleating of a sheep) in a way that is autonomous of their affects, and this identification
of characteristic marks simply is language, so that the origin of language lies in human
nature. By contrast, in the Fragments he emphasizes that the origin of language almost
certainly radically antedates our earliest records, so that we need to approach the ques-
tion of what its character was indirectly and tentatively, carefully putting together the
various sorts of indirect empirical evidence that are available to us and letting them
guide us to the best available hypothesis. Accordingly, he gathers quite a wide range of
evidence that all seems to point towards a purely human origin of language. This evi-
dence includes an analogy with the way in which other human arts about whose origin
we know more have developed, namely from crude beginnings to complexity and
refinement over the course of many generations;3 the deep differences between lan-
guages (which would be difficult to explain if their origin lay in God, but not if it lay in
human beings);4 the predominantly sensuous and verb/action-based character of the
oldest known languages, in contrast with more recent languages (which points to an
origin of language in the more primitive side of human nature);5 and the fact that all
known languages are full of imperfections such as synonyms and irregularities (which
would be difficult to explain if God were their source, but not if human beings are).6
This case in the Fragments is perhaps especially impressive for its general method:
its reliance, when faced with a question that cannot be answered by more direct means,
on adducing a wide variety of forms of indirect empirical evidence and on demonstrat-
ing that these all point towards a single hypothesis, which may therefore be tentatively
accepted as the correct answer. (Compare here Herder’s similar approach to answering
the question of the origin of human beings themselves in Ideas, Part 2.)
3
HPW, pp. 54–5 = G1:604. 4
HPW, pp. 57, 64 = G1:606–7, 614–15.
5
HPW, pp. 60, 63–4 = G1:610–11, 613–15. 6
HPW, p. 64 = G1:614–15.
18 Philosophy of Language
This method strikingly anticipates the sort of method that Darwin later used in
The Origin of Species (1859) in order to answer the question of the origin of species by
means of the hypothesis of evolution by natural selection, a method that similarly
adduces a wide variety of types of empirical evidence (including, for example, the
analogous phenomenon of artificial selection, the disparate forms that isolated groups
of organisms from the same species develop over time, the phenomenon of individual
reversions to an earlier type, as in the case of domesticated pigeons and the rock dove
for instance, the fossil record, and the developmental stages of embryos) and shows
that this all points towards a single hypothesis.
It is not clear whether Herder actually influenced Darwin in this respect. However,
given Herder’s significant anticipations of the theory of evolution in the Ideas (to be
discussed in Chapter 8) and Darwin’s frequent use of nineteenth-century German lin-
guistics as a model for the character of his own inquiry, it does not seem unlikely that
there was at least some indirect influence.
Nonetheless, the issue of the origin of language is unlikely to be, and probably
should not be, our main reason for being interested in Herder’s philosophy of language
today. Ironically, this is largely because Herder and the theorists who subsequently
followed his naturalistic approach to the question of language’s origin have so clearly
won their case. It is also in part because the whole dispute has today lost most of its zest
due to the fact that a much broader range of considerations has now made the very idea
that there is a God look implausible and antiquated (thereby, of course, reinforcing
Herder’s conclusion that language’s origin is natural). And finally, it is also in part
because Herder in addition has a rich fund of further positions in the philosophy of
language that are of equally fundamental importance and of much greater contem
porary relevance. So let us now turn to these.
Three Fundamental Principles

Herder’s most fundamental and important achievement in the philosophy of language
arguably lies in his position concerning the very nature of language, thought, and
meaning. Already as early as the mid-1760s—for example, in On Diligence in Several
Learned Languages [henceforth: On Diligence] (1764) and the Fragments (1767–8)—he
developed three fundamental principles in this area:
(1) Thought is essentially dependent on, and bounded in its scope by, language—
i.e. one can only think if one has a language, and one can only think what one
can express linguistically. (To his considerable philosophical credit, Herder
normally refrains from adopting a more radical, but less philosophically ten-
able, version of this principle, favored by some of his successors, which simply
identifies thought with language, or with inner language.)
(2) Meanings or concepts are—not the sorts of items, in principle autonomous of
language, with which much of the philosophical tradition has equated them,
e.g. the things referred to (as Augustine held), objective forms (in the manner
of Plato), or subjective mental ideas (à la Locke, Hume, or Condillac), but

instead—usages of words.
(3) Conceptualization is intimately bound up with perceptual and affective sen-
sation. More precisely: Herder holds a quasi-empiricist theory of concepts
according to which sensation is the source and basis of all our concepts, but
(a) the converse is also true, and (b) we are also able to achieve something like
non-empirical concepts by means of metaphorical extensions from the empir-
ical ones, which two qualifications leave it the case, though, that all of our
concepts ultimately depend on sensation in one way or another.
The first two of these three principles dramatically overturned the sort of dualistic
picture of the relation between language, on the one hand, and thought or meaning, on
the other, that had predominated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
They thereby essentially founded the philosophy of language as we still know it today.
Hamann has often been credited with introducing something like these two revolu-
tionary principles and then passing them on to Herder (for example, by Isaiah Berlin).
But that turns out to be a mistake; Herder was already committed to them by the
mid-1760s, Hamann only considerably later, in a cruder form, and under Herder’s
influence.
The third principle, quasi-empiricism, would be far less widely accepted by philo-
sophers of language today than the first two. However, it may well be correct as well.
Contrary to first appearances, it need not conflict with thesis (2), the equation of
meanings with word-usages. And the most likely modern ground for skepticism about
it, namely a Fregean–Wittgensteinian anti-psychologism concerning meaning that is
popular today, may well itself be mistaken.
In addition to making a fundamental contribution to the philosophy of language,
these three principles also enabled Herder to develop revolutionary new theories of
interpretation and translation, and to make a decisive contribution to the birth of
whole new disciplines concerned with language, such as linguistics and anthropology
(as we shall see later).
Let us, then, consider Herder’s development of these three principles in a little more
detail. As is well known, a model of thought, meaning, and language that predomin
ated during the Enlightenment, saliently among the British Empiricists for example,
conceived of thought and meaning in a sharply dualistic fashion as (at least in principle)
autonomous and separable from whatever material, perceptible expressions they may
happen to receive in language, and of language as merely a means to their memoriza-
tion and communication that is inessential to their actual existence. Herder’s first two
fundamental principles in the philosophy of language contradict this model.
The first of them, principle (1), asserts that thought is essentially dependent on and
bounded by language—i.e. that one cannot think unless one has a language and that
one can only think what one can express linguistically.
This principle is not only important in its own right but also carries important
implications for interpretation. For example, in a certain and important sense it
guarantees that a person’s use of language is bound to be a reliable indicator of the

nature of his thought (that the nature of his thought cannot radically transcend, or be
discrepant with, his use of language). Hence Herder writes in the Metacritique (1799)
that language is a “mirror of the human understanding.”7
It is fairly well known that Herder commits himself to some such principle as this in
later works from the 1780s and 1790s such as the Ideas (1784–91) and the Metacritique
(1799). For example, he writes in the Ideas that “a people has no idea for which it has no
word.”8 However, it is of some importance—especially for the purpose of determining
where it came from—to realize that he was already firmly committed to it much earlier.
Thus, moving backwards chronologically: Versions of it can already be found in On the
Cognition and Sensation (1778)9 and in the Treatise (1772).10 Even before that, it is
already prominent in the Fragments (1767–8), where Herder writes, for example:
[Language is] the form of cognition, not merely in which but also in accordance with which
thoughts take shape, where in all parts of literature thought sticks [klebt] to expression, and forms
itself in accordance with this . . . Language sets limits and contour for all human cognition.11
And indeed, Herder is already committed to a version of it even earlier than that, in the
essay On Diligence (1764), where he writes:
What exactly is the connection between language and mode of thought? Whoever surveys the
whole scope of a language surveys a field of thoughts and whoever learns to express himself
with exactness precisely thereby gathers for himself a treasure of determinate concepts. The
first words that we mumble are the most important foundation stones of the understanding,
and our nursemaids are our first teachers of logic.12
Herder’s mentor Hamann has often been credited with inventing a revolutionary
principle of this general sort and communicating it to Herder (for example, by Rudolf
Haym, Fritz Mauthner, Josef Nadler, Roger Brown, Isaiah Berlin, Fred Beiser, and Ian
Hacking).13 However, this is a mistake. As I have argued in detail elsewhere,14 while it is
7
S21:19. As Herder points out, Leibniz had already said this before him.
8
G6:347, cf. 138–42; also, On the Ability to Speak and Hear (1795), S18:384ff.; Metacritique, S21:19, 88,
293–4.
9
HPW, pp. 211–13 = G4:357–9. 10
HPW, pp. 91–2 = G1:727.
11
HPW, pp. 48–50 = G1:556–7; cf. G1:177, 394–7, 403–4, 407–10, 426, 558, 606–8 (though contrast 259,
404–6).
12
G1:27.
13
R. Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken (Berlin: Gaertner, 1880), 1:137–8; F. Mauthner,
Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1902; 3rd edn. Berlin: Felix Meiner, 1923), 2:47; J. Nadler, Johann Georg
Hamann (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1949); R. Brown, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Conception of Linguistic
Relativity (The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1967), ch. 4; I. Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of
Ideas (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 165–7; F.C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 16; I. Hacking, “How, Why, When, and Where Did Language Go
Public?” and “Night Thoughts on Philology,” both in his Historical Ontology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2002).
14
See M.N. Forster, “Herder’s Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation: Three Fundamental
Principles” and “Hamann’s Seminal Importance for the Philosophy of Language?” both in his After Herder:
Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
true that Hamann was the older man, began his career as an author first, was deeply
interested in and published some unusual ideas about language first, nurtured Herder’s
intellectual growth generally and his interest in language in particular, taught Herder
foreign languages, and so forth, concerning this vital principle the historical record
strongly suggests that the debt was the other way round: Herder adopted it first and
Hamann then took it over from him. For whereas, as we just saw, Herder was already
firmly committed to the principle as early as 1764, Hamann was still a conventional
Enlightenment dualist about thought and language in the early 1760s and did not
espouse anything like the principle in question until (after a hiatus of several years
during which he published little) the early 1770s.
Moreover, Herder’s formulations of the principle tend to be far more philosoph
ically circumspect and defensible than Hamann’s. Hamann is prone to crude formula-
tions of it, such as: “reason is language, logos.”15 This sort of simplistic formulation is
not philosophically defensible. For, one can think without in the process expressing
what one thinks linguistically—for example, someone thinks that Jones is a fool, but
never says so. And conversely, one can use language without in the process doing any
corresponding thinking—for example, someone who does not understand English
can parrot the sentence “It is a fine day” without thereby thinking of its being a fine day.
To Herder’s credit, he avoids this sort of simplistic formulation.16
Herder does occasionally adopt the only slightly more promising position that thought
is internal speech.17 Under his influence this would later become Schleiermacher’s
standard position as well. This position is still philosophically objectionable, albeit less
obviously so. For, one can think something without in the process expressing what one
thinks in language even internally. For example, one is sitting upstairs at home work-
ing, having been told that John will be coming home before Mary, one hears the front
door open and footsteps mount the stairs, Mary appears in the room, and one says,
quite truly, “I thought it was John,” even though no such little formula had run through
15
J.G. Hamann, Briefwechsel, ed. W. Ziesemer and A. Henkel (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1955–), 5:177. This
remark comes from the year 1784.
16
There are a few apparent exceptions to this rule. But when considered more closely they rather
confirm it. For example, someone might be tempted to compare with Hamann’s simplistic formulation
just quoted a statement of Herder’s that may well have inspired it: “In the deepest languages . . . reason and
word are only one concept, one thing: logos” (On the Cognition and Sensation, HPW, p. 211 = G4:358). But
Herder’s statement is significantly less bald than Hamann’s. For to approve other languages for showing
insight into the intimacy of the connection between thought and language by using the same term/concept
for both is not quite to say oneself that they are the very same thing. Again, Herder does write in the
Fragments that “in common life it is surely clear that thought is almost nothing else but speaking” (HPW,
p. 50 = G1:558). But he does not here quite say that thought is speaking, only that it is “almost nothing else
but” speaking; and indeed elsewhere in the Fragments he argues that even the conception that expression
relates to thought like the skin to the body does not leave enough of a distinction between them
(G1:404–6).
17
Herder already comes close to saying this in the Fragments: “We think in language . . . and in common
life it is surely clear that thought is almost nothing else but speaking” (HPW, pp. 49–50 = G1:558). He holds
a version of it (albeit an idiosyncratic one) in the Treatise. And he asserts it explicitly in the Metacritique:
“What is thinking? Speaking inwardly, that is, expressing to oneself the characteristic marks [Merkmale]
which one has internalized” (S21:88, cf. 19).
one’s mind, merely a perception of the front door and the footsteps and a feeling of
unsurprise. And conversely, one can express language even internally without in the
process doing any corresponding thinking. For example, our person who does not
understand English can say to himself internally “It is a fine day,” say after picking up
this sentence from English-language television, without thereby thinking of its being
a fine day.18
However, as the passages that I quoted earlier from the Ideas, the Fragments, and
On Diligence show, Herder’s usual position is instead the much more circumspect
and philosophically defensible one that thinking is essentially dependent on language-
possession and bounded in its scope by the thinker’s capacity for linguistic expression
simpliciter.
It would be a mistake, though, to infer from the fact that Herder does not owe this
principle to Hamann and that his formulations of it are significantly subtler than
Hamann’s that he therefore invented it ex nihilo. On the contrary, at the time when
Herder first espoused it, versions or close variants of it were already quite common
among thinkers with whom he was familiar. It was indeed already a fairly widespread
“paradigm,” or a fairly widespread counter-paradigm to the Enlightenment’s more
standard dualistic paradigm.
To mention four then recent representatives of such a principle who were already
well known to Herder: First, the influential literary journal founded by Lessing, Moses
Mendelssohn, and Friedrich Nicolai, Letters concerning the Most Recent Literature
(1759–65),19 on which Herder’s Fragments provided a sort of commentary, had already
made several champions of such a position known to Herder. These included
Mendelssohn himself, Thomas Abbt, and a certain Dr. Löscher. Second, Herder had
also encountered a version of the principle in Süßmilch, who had adduced it in his
Attempt at a Proof that the First Language received Its Origin not from Man but solely
from the Creator in order to try to refute naturalistic accounts of the origin of language
according to which language is a human invention (how could humans have invented
language if having a language is a precondition of doing any (rational) thinking?).
Third, as Hans Aarsleff has pointed out, the French tradition had already developed
versions or close variants of the principle in question as well—in particular, Condillac
in An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746) and Rousseau in the Discourse
on the Origin of Inequality (1755).20 And fourth, Herder had also encountered a version
of the principle in the English poet Edward Young, whose didactic poem Night
Thoughts (1742) contains similar ideas. Accordingly, Herder would later in life quote
the following lines from Young’s poem in connection with the principle:
18
For some points similar to the above against an outright identification of thought with either external
or internal linguistic expression, cf. L. Wittgenstein, Zettel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), par. 100 and Remarks
on the Philosophy of Psychology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), vol. 2.
19
Briefe die neueste Literatur betreffend (Berlin: Friedrich Nicolai, 1759–65).
20
H. Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), esp. pp. 150, 163–6.
Speech, Thought’s Canal! Speech, Thought’s Criterion too.

Thought, in the Mine, may come forth Gold or Dross;
When coin’d in Word, we know its real Worth.21
And that he was already reflecting on these ideas of Young’s by as early as 1765 can be
seen from an allusion to them in an essay that he wrote in that year for and about
Hamann.22
This fairly widespread paradigm, or counter-paradigm, on which Herder was
drawing had, for all practical intents and purposes, a single ultimate source: the
Leibniz–Wolff tradition. For Leibniz had already developed the principle that thought
is deeply dependent on language in his Dialogue on the Connection between Things and
Words (1677):
B. This . . . makes me realize that in my thinking I never recognize, discover, or prove any truth
without calling up to mind words or some other kind of signs. A. Quite so; yes, if there were no
signs, we should never think or conclude anything intelligibly.23
And under Leibniz’s influence Christian Wolff had then gone on to argue for a version
of the principle more publicly and elaborately in his Empirical Psychology (1732)24 and
Rational Psychology (1734).25 The authors of the Letters concerning the Most Recent
Literature all clearly stand under Wolff ’s dominating influence in their commitment to
the principle.26 Similarly, Süßmilch explicitly credits the principle and most of his
arguments for it to Wolff.27 The French tradition leads back to Wolff as well—for
Rousseau clearly got the principle from Condillac, and Condillac explicitly (albeit
grudgingly) attributes it to Wolff.28 Young (who is in any case a less clear example of the
21
S18:385. 22
G1:39.
23
Leibniz Selections, ed. P.P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), p. 9. Cf. Leibniz’s
Unvorgreifliche Gedanken, betreffend die Ausübung und Verbesserung der deutschen Sprache (1697).
24
C. Wolff, Psychologia Empirica, in his Gesammelte Werke (repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968),
especially pars. 284–5, 342, 351, 368–9.
25
C. Wolff, Psychologia Rationalis, in his Gesammelte Werke, especially par. 461.
26
Mendelssohn was heavily influenced by Wolff quite generally; Abbt and Meier were both students of
Baumgarten, Wolff ’s most important student; the specific arguments for the doctrine that Mendelssohn
and Abbt give are the same as, and clearly inspired by, Wolff ’s (for example, like Wolff, Mendelssohn in
letter 144 and in part 13 of the Letters concerning the Most Recent Literature saliently appeals to introspection,
or the fact that if one tries to think without words or signs one finds oneself unable to do so, argues that
without words or signs the soul cannot grasp “the first elements of thoughts, the separations,” and also uses
Wolff ’s terminology of “symbolic cognition” as contrasted with “intuitive cognition”; and like Wolff, Abbt
in remarks from 1758 appeals to introspection and argues that words are required for abstract concepts
and hence also for inference); and so on.
27
Note that by contrast the French were not a significant influence on Süßmilch; he had not read
Condillac, and he only read the relevant parts of Rousseau late in the process of composing his own work.
28
E.B. de Condillac, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, ed. T. Nugent (Gainsville, Fla.: Scholars’
Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971), p. 136. Moreover, Condillac’s explicit attribution of the principle to Wolff
comes just after an extended discussion of two examples that, as he notes, he has likewise borrowed from
Wolff: one of a boy born deaf-and-dumb, the other of a boy reared by bears (cf. Wolff, Psychologia
Rationalis, par. 461). Hence, in respect of this principle at least, Aarsleff ’s provocative attempt in From
Locke to Saussure to represent the French rather than the Germans as the originators of all the main ideas
in the philosophy of language that arose in this period ultimately fails.
principle and probably less important as an influence on Herder) may well have been
influenced by Wolff too (given his religious and philosophical interests and the dates).
In sum, for all intents and purposes, the ultimate source of the principle was the
Leibniz–Wolff tradition. One might therefore reasonably speak in this connection of
the Leibniz–Wolff paradigm, or the Leibniz–Wolff counter-paradigm.
Wolff himself was ambivalent about exactly what strength to give this principle,
however. Did it apply to all thought or only to certain sorts of thought, for example
only to rational thought? Was the dependence on language a truly essential, a truly
necessary, one or merely of some weaker sort? Most of the time Wolff implies the latter,
less ambitious, answers to these questions.29 But there are also passages in which he
seems to imply the former, more ambitious, ones—that language is truly necessary for
all thought.30 Not surprisingly, therefore, the thinkers who worked within the Leibniz–
Wolff paradigm before Herder were similarly divided. For example, Löscher and Abbt
both believe that the principle applies to all thought, whereas Süßmilch believes that it
applies, not to all thought, but only to rational thought. And whereas Löscher and Abbt
think that the dependence is a truly necessary one, Mendelssohn explicitly questions
this, and Süßmilch generally stops short of making such a claim as well, instead char-
acterizing (rational) thought’s dependence on language merely in terms of the latter
being the only existing causal means to the former.
The tendency of Herder’s version of the principle is towards the stronger claims,
towards insisting, like Löscher and Abbt, that all thought is essentially, or necessarily,
dependent on language. That he tends to make the principle one about all thought is
already evident from the formulations in On Diligence and the Fragments that I quoted
earlier. That he also believes the dependence in question to be essential becomes par-
ticularly clear in the Treatise, where this constitutes one of his main grounds of com-
plaint against Süßmilch’s weaker version of the doctrine.31
This position that the dependence on language is both exceptionless for all thought
and essential seems intuitively plausible. But that still leaves the important question of
what the justification and explanation for such a principle might be. This remains very
much a live question in the philosophy of language today. For, as Donald Davidson
points out, recent “philosophers have, for the most part, preferred taking a stand on
the issue [of the relation between thought and talk] to producing an argument.
29
For example, at Psychologia Empirica, par. 284 he merely argues that our abstractions become clearer
and more distinct by the use of words, and he even expresses skepticism about people who infer from this
that we cannot think without the use of words. Similarly, at Psychologia Rationalis, par. 461 he merely
argues, under the significant heading “The dependence of the use of reason on the use of speech”: “The use
of reason is facilitated and amplified by the use of speech; without the use of speech the use of reason may
scarcely be conceded.”
30
For example, at Psychologia Empirica, par. 342 he concludes: “And thus the indispensable necessity of
words for designating our perceptions and of an indissoluble connection between intuitive cognition and
symbolic cognition becomes clear.” And at Psychologia Rationalis, par. 461 he concludes: “Hence it is suffi-
ciently shown how great is the necessity of words or other equivalent signs for the production of mental
operations.”
31
See especially Treatise, HPW, pp. 90–1 = G1:725–6.
Whatever the reason, the question of the relationship between thought and speech
seems seldom to have been asked for its own sake.”32 The observations that follow may
therefore be of more than merely historical interest.
The philosophers who had worked within the Leibniz–Wolff paradigm before
Herder had already generated quite a few arguments in support of the principle.
In particular, Wolff, Condillac, and Süßmilch had all offered multiple arguments for
their versions of it, arguments that largely overlapped but also included some signifi-
cant differences. Süßmilch’s case is representative, and was probably the one that most
directly influenced Herder, so let us focus on that here. Süßmilch had offered several
arguments in support of his version of the principle, among which the following are
the most important: First (following Wolff), he had observed in its support that deaf-
and-dumb people lack reason insofar as they lack language (he concedes that they can
have reason to the extent that they employ hand-signs, but he considers these to be
both equivalent to and parasitic on language-use).33 Second and similarly (but now, he
says, following Hobbes), he had noted in its support that a child’s reason develops in
step with its grasp of language.34 Third (again closely following an argument of Wolff ’s),
he had argued that without the aid of signs it would be too difficult for people to recog-
nize and abstract from the flux of experience the characteristic marks [Charaktere]
that are required for the formation of general concepts, which are in turn required for
any rational thought.35
Hamann makes no progress on the question of justification and explanation at all,
instead simply admitting bafflement about it (in a well-known late passage he writes,
“For me these depths are still covered in darkness; I am still waiting for an apocalyptic
angel with a key to this abyss”).36 But Herder’s position is more sophisticated and
interesting—and it is arguably here that he makes his most original contribution
to the topic.
Herder does not by any means entirely reject Süßmilch’s case. As early as the
Fragments and then throughout his subsequent career he himself uses versions of
Süßmilch’s first and second arguments, concerning the deaf-and-dumb and children,
32
D. Davidson, “Thought and Talk,” in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991), p. 156.
33
Süßmilch, Versuch, pp. 47–9, 56. Cf. Wolff, Psychologia Rationalis, par. 461. Wolff ’s version of the
principle had made room for the possibility mentioned in parentheses as well, namely by framing the prin-
ciple in terms of “words or other equivalent signs” (a phrase that Süßmilch echoes).
34
Versuch, pp. 50–1. Wolff had almost made this argument as well, for he had argued that reason is not
innate but is acquired by children (Psychologia Rationalis, pars. 458–9), and he had noted in support of the
claim that reason depends on language that in cases in which children have been raised by bears and hence
without language they have lacked reason until they subsequently began to acquire language (par. 461).
35
Versuch, pp. 33–4, 37–44. Cf. Wolff, Psychologia Empirica, par. 284; Psychologia Rationalis, par. 461.
Wolff tends to make his version of this point without invoking a distinction between characteristic marks
and general concepts—which actually seems preferable, philosophically speaking, because characteristic
marks are surely themselves really general concepts, the two-stage model really only applying to the special
case of complex general concepts.
36
Hamann, Briefwechsel, 5:177.
in order to support the principle.37 And (as we are about to see) at least in the Treatise
he also accepts a version of Süßmilch’s third argument. So he clearly believes that these
arguments do go some way towards justifying the principle.
However, he also implies, quite rightly, that they are insufficient to justify or explain
the version of the principle that he himself believes to be correct, namely the strong
version according to which all thought is essentially dependent on language. This is the
main thrust of his criticism of Süßmilch in this area in the Treatise.38 And the same
complaint could have been leveled with equal legitimacy against the arguments that
Wolff and Condillac had provided as well. For all of these arguments share with
Süßmilch’s arguments the shortcoming of being in one way or another merely empir
ical rather than conceptual in character, and of therefore being unable to justify or
explain any claim of an essential dependence.39 To have perceived this insufficiency,
and the consequent need for a better justification and explanation of the strong version
of the principle, is one of Herder’s two main contributions in this area.
His other is to have succeeded in actually providing such a superior justification and
explanation. However, that he did so is by no means obvious. For his most explicit and
best-known attempt, in the Treatise, is actually a rather miserable failure.
His strategy there is basically to take over Süßmilch’s third argument (concerning
characteristic marks) but to modify it in two ways. His first modification in effect con-
sists of maintaining that general concepts, and hence characteristic marks (which
Süßmilch had called Charaktere and which Herder himself calls Merkmale), are neces-
sary conditions, not merely of all rational thought, but of all conceptualization and
thought.40 His second modification aims to turn the third argument from being, like
the first and the second, merely an empirical argument, which consequently shares
with them the weakness of inevitably failing to prove or explain any essential dependence
37
See Fragments, HPW, p. 48 = G1:556 for an early version of the argument concerning children. See
esp. On the Cognition and Sensation, HPW, p. 211 = G4:357–8 for both arguments: “Those born deaf and
dumb demonstrate in special tests how deeply reason, self-consciousness, slumbers, when they cannot
imitate”; “Thus, as we see, does the child attain its mental constitution, it learns to speak . . . and precisely as
a result and in the same way to think. Whoever has observed children, how they learn to speak and think,
the peculiar anomalies and analogies which are expressed in the process, will hardly have any further
doubts.” For a later appeal to the argument concerning the deaf-and-dumb, see Ideas, G6:139, 347.
38
See especially HPW, pp. 90–1 = G1:725–6.
39
Of course, this situation is not really surprising given that Wolff, Condillac, and Süßmilch were not—
or at least not usually—committed to the strong form of the principle that Herder is espousing, and for
which their arguments are inadequate.
40
HPW, pp. 87–8 = G1:722–3: “[The human being] demonstrates reflection when he can not only
recognize all the properties [of an object] in a vivid or clear way, but can in his own mind acknowledge
one or several as distinguishing properties. The first act of this acknowledgment provides a distinct con-
cept . . . What brought about this acknowledgment? A characteristic mark that he had to separate off.” Cf.
Metacritique, S21:208–9, 250–1, where Herder argues that general concepts are prior to (or at least coeval
with) any recognition of particulars in human thought, language, or sensation. Incidentally, Hermann
Samuel Reimarus had already argued for a priority of general concepts over particular concepts in his
Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Tiere, hauptsächlich über ihre Kunsttriebe (1760; last revised
edn. 1762; latter repr. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1982), 1:35–6 and probably influenced Herder
on this point.
of (rational) thought on language, into a conceptual argument, which therefore can

prove and explain an essential dependence. His solution here is very quick: he simply
identifies the fundamental aspect of (rational) thought whose practicability Süßmilch
had claimed required the help of language, namely the recognition of characteristic
marks, as itself language.41
However, the new argument that results from these modifications fails. The first
modification, while not obviously correct, at least looks very plausible—so far so
good.42 But the second modification is at bottom merely sophistical. It arguably suc-
ceeds in a very modest sense: if it were legitimate to call the recognition of characteris-
tic marks language, then the argument would now somewhat plausibly justify and
explain a claim that all thought is essentially dependent on language, since it is indeed
somewhat plausible to hold that all thought requires general-concept-possession, and
that all general-concept-possession requires the recognition of characteristic marks.43
But the problem is that calling the recognition of characteristic marks language is not
legitimate. Instead, it is merely an unacknowledged stipulative redefinition of the word
“language,” which, in thus seeming to make possible a justification and explanation of
the principle that all thought is essentially dependent on language, in reality changes
the meaning of the principle and deprives it of virtually all its original interest—which
depended on “language” being meant in something like its usual sense. It is, after all,
no great news (though it might not be completely trivial) to be told that all thought is
essentially dependent on certain fundamental aspects of thought!44
Herder soon recognized the weakness of this merely specious solution to the task of
justification and explanation and accordingly abandoned it. Thus he already expresses
general misgivings about the Treatise as early as 1772.45 And he then publicly retracts the
work’s key move of internalizing “language” in On the Cognition and Sensation of 1778.46
41
HPW, pp. 87–90, 97 = G1:722–5, 733.
42
Much subsequent philosophy has followed this path of holding that all conceptualization and thought,
even about particulars, implicitly rest on general concepts. One example, directly influenced by Herder, is
Hegel’s argument concerning demonstratives such as this, now, and here in the “Sense-certainty” section of
his Phenomenology of Spirit. Another example is the later Wittgenstein’s position concerning the nature of
both ostension and proper names.
43
With due regard to a point that I made about Wolff ’s position in note 35: either because the general
concept is complex and requires characteristic marks to constitute it or because it itself is a characteristic
mark.
44
This problem is not significantly diminished by Herder’s clever choice in this connection of the
example of a sheep’s bleating, i.e. an expressive sound (something a bit like a use of language). This choice
may succeed in confusing an unwary reader, but it does not make Herder’s case any more cogent. For one
thing, a perception of a sheep’s bleating is not itself a bleating. For another thing, on Herder’s own account
of animal communication, a sheep’s bleating is not genuine language anyway. For yet another thing, only a
subset of characteristic marks that sound are expressive ones like this one. For yet a fourth thing, charac-
teristic marks that sound are themselves only a modest subset of all characteristic marks (for example,
there are also visual ones). Nor is Herder’s attempt, in the face of the last of these problems, to extend
his theory from the supposedly paradigmatic case of sounding expressions such as bleating to all other
characteristic marks by means of a thesis of an original synesthesia convincing.
45
Herder Briefe, 2:130–4.
46
HPW, p. 211 = G4:357. Herder was perhaps moved to do this by Hamann’s criticisms of the Treatise
on this score in his Philological Thoughts of 1772.
However, there is also a second principle that can be found in Herder’s texts, which,
besides being of immense importance for the philosophy of language and the theory
of interpretation and translation in its own right, also makes possible a much more
compelling argument for the first principle.
This second principle, principle (2), denies that meanings or concepts are to be
equated with the sorts of items, in principle autonomous of language, with which
most of the philosophical tradition has equated them—for example, the things referred
to (Augustine), objective “forms” (Plato), or subjective mental “ideas” (the British
Empiricists and others)47—and instead equates them with usages of words.48
In addition to being very important in its own right, this principle also has import
ant consequences for Herder’s theories of interpretation and translation: It is an imme-
diate implication of the principle for the theory of interpretation that interpretation
essentially and fundamentally involves discovering word-usages. Accordingly, Herder
writes in On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–3):
Let us seek the word’s concept not from etymologies, which are always uncertain, but accord-
ing to the clear use [Gebrauch] of the name in its various times.49
The principle also grounds a central principle of Herder’s theory of translation, namely
that translation’s fundamental goal of faithfully reproducing a work’s meanings in a
different language requires a reproduction of the original word-usages, which, if they
are not already available in the target language (as they rarely if ever will be in cases
where historical or cultural distance is involved), must be achieved by a “bending” of
the closest pre-given word-usages from the target language performed over the course
of the translation.50
Hamann has again sometimes been credited with inventing a principle concerning
meaning of this general sort and passing it on to Herder (for example, by Isaiah
Berlin).51 Hamann certainly does embrace such a principle during the 1770s and
1780s. However, it again seems to me very probable that Herder is the source here and
Hamann the borrower. For at least until the early 1760s Hamann was still committed
to a conventional dualistic picture of the relation between concepts and words that
accorded the former priority and autonomy over the latter, whereas by the mid-1760s
at the latest Herder was already committed to the new principle in question.
47
For an excellent account of this “way of ideas,” see I. Hacking, Why does Language Matter to
Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chs. 2–5.
48
This principle is often overlooked even by the better literature on Herder’s philosophy of language, for
example the recent books by Charles Taylor and Eugenio Coseriu.
49
G5:1007. Cf. Fragments, G1:322, 421–3. This is not to say that for Herder interpretation only involves
determining word-usages. It is in fact one of his most important innovations in the theory of interpretation,
in contrast with predecessors such as Johann August Ernesti, to have insisted that interpretation essentially
involves determining much more as well—for example, besides linguistic meanings or word-usages, also
aspects of an author’s psychology and a work’s genre.
50
See, for example, Fragments, G1:199–200, 205; Popular Songs [Volkslieder] (1774), G3:26.
51
Berlin, Vico and Herder, p. 165: “Herder had derived from Hamann his notion that words and ideas
are one” (cf. pp. 166–7). Similarly, Beiser argues that Hamann was already committed to an anti-Platonic
nominalism in 1759 (The Fate of Reason, p. 25).
Thus, concerning the positive equation of meanings or concepts with word-usages

(and a consequent conception that interpretation essentially involves the discovery of
word-usages), as we saw earlier, Herder already writes in On Diligence (1764) when
discussing the connection between language and thought:
Whoever learns to express himself with exactness precisely thereby gathers for himself a
treasure of determinate concepts. The first words that we mumble are the most important
foundation stones of the understanding.52
Similarly, he already in On the Change of Taste (1766) uses the term “name” as a virtual
synonym for “concept.”53 And he already in the Fragments (1767–8) insists on the
“adhesion of the thought to the word” or the “expression,” writes concerning the
understanding of concepts that “the question is not how an expression can be etymo-
logically derived and analytically determined, but how it is used,”54 and accordingly
advocates that in order, for example, to understand the changing nature of people’s
moral concepts one must closely scrutinize their changing word-usages.55
So much for Herder’s commitment to the principle’s positive side.56 Regarding its
negative side, its rejection of more traditional accounts of meanings or concepts, the
situation is as follows: It seems pretty clear that the passages just cited are already in
large part directed against the Enlightenment’s standard equation of concepts with
subjective mental “ideas,” conceived in dualistic terms as prior to and autonomous of
language.57 Concerning rejection of Platonic “forms,” Herder already writes in a letter
to Mendelssohn from 1769 regarding the latter’s Platonically inspired Phaedo:
Nothing in the world, I think, has produced more opinions and perhaps also more errors than
that one has considered and hypostatized [realisiert] abstract concepts as individual existences.
Thus do we hypostatize the word Nature, Virtue, Reality, Perfection. Originally these concepts
were nothing but abstractions, relations of this to that, so-to-speak shadows and colors of things;
we make them into things themselves, and hence imagine finished skill-things [Fertigkeiten],
52
G1:27.
53
HPW, p. 249 = G1:151: there are peoples “who are so different that they scarcely have a common name
[i.e. concept] left.” Cf. Treatise, HPW, p. 96 = G1:733, where Herder approves of languages in which
“concept and word . . . share one name.”
54
G1:421–3. Cf. On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–3), G5:1007, as recently quoted: “Let us seek the
word’s concept not from etymologies, which are always uncertain, but according to the clear use [Gebrauch]
of the name in its various times.”
55
HPW, pp. 47–8 = G1:322 (Greek slightly amended): an interpreter must “trace the metamorphoses
which in Greek the words anêr, anthrôpos, agathos, kalos, philokalos, kalok’agathos, kakos, epicheirêtês, and
in Latin vir, homo, bonus and melior and optimus, honestus, pulcher and liberalis, strenuus and such national
words have undergone, which were the honor of their age, and changed with it.”
56
The later Herder remains committed to this positive position. Consider, for example, the following
remark in the Metacritique: “No boy will . . . , once he has grasped the word’s sense, seek this sense outside
and behind the word, but will seek it in the word and take possession of it by means of the word” (S21:173;
though this late work also contains a few passages that seem to imply a contrary view, e.g. S21:120, 123–4).
57
Cf. Herder’s later renunciation in On the Cognition and Sensation of the version of such a theory that
he had himself temporarily lapsed into in the Treatise, as well as his criticism of Kant’s relevantly similar
theory of “schematism” in the Metacritique.
which the soul collects like gold pieces, realities that are only relations and which we think of
as positions, perfections that we individualize and attribute as such to the soul. Let us . . . by
analysis of the concepts get back to the origin of these words; and we will see in them substan-
tived phenomena [phenomena substantiata].58
Finally, Herder also from an early period rejects any equation of meanings with ref-
erents. The Fragments and the Treatise already imply such a rejection, and develop
several quite compelling arguments for it (to be discussed below). And Herder later
articulates it more explicitly in the Ideas as follows:
No language expresses things [Sachen] but only names. Also no human reason therefore has
cognition of things but it has only characteristic marks of them which it signifies with words.59
Consequently, it again seems very probable that this second principle was Herder’s
before it was Hamann’s, and that it migrated from Herder to Hamann rather than
vice versa.60
However, as in the case of the first principle, the historical situation here is also more
complicated. For if Herder was probably not indebted to Hamann here, there are other
people to whom he certainly was. Specifically, Spinoza had already argued in the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) that “words gain their meaning [significationem]
solely from their usage [ex solo usu].”61 And under Spinoza’s influence just before
Herder’s time there was already a movement afoot in contemporary German biblical
hermeneutics that emphasized the fundamental importance of word-usage for
meaning. For example, Johann Jakob Wettstein already wrote in a work on biblical
hermeneutics that was first published in 1756:
The true meaning [significatio] of words and phrases is not so much to be sought from etymol-
ogy or from single words taken separately, but rather from usage [ex usu] and examples.62
Similarly, Johann August Ernesti’s great work Institutio interpretis Novi Testamenti
from 1761 already emphasized that a word’s meaning depends on its usage, and that
interpreting a word therefore essentially turns on discovering its usage:
It is evident that the signification [sensum] of words depends upon the usage of language
[ab usu loquendi]; and that the latter being known, the former is known also.63
58
Herder Briefe, 1:179–80; cf. Metacritique, S21:172. 59
G6:348; cf. 348–50.
60
Once Hamann is deprived of the credit for introducing these two revolutionary principles in the
philosophy of language, the foundations of the—still very widespread, but basically mistaken—conception
that he was the deep, obscure well from which Herder drew most of his best ideas (a conception still found
in Berlin and Beiser, for example) really begin to crumble.
61
B. de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise; a Political Treatise, tr. R.H.M. Elwes (first published
under a different title, New York: Dover, 1951), p. 167.
62
J.J. Wettstein, Libelli ad crisin atque interpretationem Novi Testamenti (1st edn. 1756; 2nd edn. Halle,
Magdeburg: I.G. Trampe, 1766), p. 120. Notice that Wettstein here echoes not only Spinoza’s thought but
also his very wording.
63
J.A. Ernesti, Institutio interpretis Novi Testamenti (1761), translated as Ernesti’s Institutes, ed.
C.H. Terrot (Edinburgh: Thomas Clark, 1832), 1:27, cf. 63.
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Recent
discussions on the abolition of patents for
inventions in the United Kingdom, France,
Germany, and the Netherlands
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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Title: Recent discussions on the abolition of patents for inventions in

the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the
Netherlands
Evidence, speeches, and papers in its favour
Compiler: R. A. Macfie
Release date: November 11, 2023 [eBook #72096]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer,

1869
Credits: Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECENT

DISCUSSIONS ON THE ABOLITION OF PATENTS FOR
INVENTIONS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, FRANCE, GERMANY,
AND THE NETHERLANDS ***
RECENT DISCUSSIONS
ON THE
ABOLITION OF PATENTS FOR
INVENTIONS
IN THE
UNITED KINGDOM, FRANCE,
GERMANY, AND THE NETHERLANDS.
Evidence, Speeches, and Papers in its

Favour
BY
Sir WILLIAM ARMSTRONG, C.B.; M. BENARD, Editor of the
“Siècle” and “Journal des
Economistes;” Count Von BISMARCK; M. CHEVALIER, Senator and
Member of the
Institute of France; M. FOCK; M. GODEFROI; Mr. MACFIE, M.P.,
Director, or
Member, of the Liverpool, Edinburgh, and Leith Chambers of
Commerce and Merchants’
House of Glasgow; Sir ROUNDELL PALMER, M.P., late Attorney-
General, &c.; Right
Hon. LORD STANLEY, M.P., Chairman of the late Royal Commission
on Patent-Law;
JAMES STIRLING, Esq., Author of “Considerations on Banks and
Bank-Management,”
“Letters from the South,” &c.; and others.
WITH SUGGESTIONS AS TO INTERNATIONAL ARRANGEMENTS
REGARDING INVENTIONS AND COPYRIGHT.
LONDON:
LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER.
1869.
“La legislation des brevets d’invention peut avoir l’effet d’entraver
notre commerce d’exportation, et de priver l’industrie nationale de
débouches utiles.... Un brevet est un privilége et un monopole. Pour
que le monopole puisse être reconnu par la loi, il est indispensable
qu’il repose sur un droit certain ou sur une utilité publique
parfaitement établie. Le peu qui précède suffit ce me semble a
démontre que l’utilité publique n’existe pas.... Le brevet d’invention
a-t-il pour base un droit positif? Il semble pourtant que non....
“Telles sont les réflexions qui sont venues à un certain nombre
d’hommes éclairés depuis quelque années et qui ont l’assentiment
d’un bon nombre d’hommes des plus notables parmi les chefs
d’industrie. Elles ont de l’écho dans touts les pays civilisés, et en
Angleterre pour le moins autant qu’en France—(1) Elles ne tendent
à rien moins qu’à renverser le système même des brevets
d’invention, sauf à rémunérer par une dotation spéciale tout homme
ingénieux qui serait reconnu, après un certain temps d’expérience,
avoir rendu à la société un service signalé par quelque découverte.
C’est ainsi qu’il a été procédé en France à l’égard des inventeurs de
la photographie.”—From the Introduction to the “Rapports du Jury
International de l’Exposition 1862, publies sous la direction de M.
Michel Chevalier, President de la Section Française.”
“Selon moi donc, le char du progres social doit être mu par

l’industrie et dirigé par l’esprit chrétien. Il s’arrête à défaut de travail,
il déraille à défaut de charité.... Et s’il est prouvé que c’est industrie
qui nourrit l’humanité, que c’est elle qui la chauffe et la préserve
contre toutes les intemperies, n’est il pas juste de dire que pousser
au développement du travail, comme nous nous proposons,
répandre dans l’esprit des travailleurs des idées qu’ils peuvent
féconder pour arriver à une invention, a un perfectionment, a un
nouveau procédé quelconque diminuant le prix de ce qui entretient
la vie, que c’est là, messieurs, de la bienfaisance par excellence.”—
President’s Opening Address of the Industrial and Scientific Society
of St. Nicolas, 1866.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Prefatory Note v
Letter from Professor J. C. Thorold Rogers viii
Remarks on an Article in the Westminster Review 1
Petition of the Newcastle Chamber of Commerce 8
Notes of Mr. Macfie, M.P., for Speech upon Motion, 28th
May, 1868 9
Speech of Sir Roundell Palmer, M.P., on that Occasion 93
Speech of Lord Stanley, M.P., on same Occasion 109
Paper by James Stirling, Esq. 116
Papers by M. Benard, “Are Inventions Property?” 124-150
Speeches of M. Chevalier and M. Paul Coq 164
Papers by M. Benard, “Results of a Bad Law” 175-180
Message of Count von Bismarck to North German
Parliament 185
Debate in the Netherlands Second Chamber 197-204
Extracts from a Memorial of the Dutch Government 225
Other Extracts regarding Abolition in Holland 226-229
Speech of E. K. Muspratt, Esq., in Liverpool
Chamber of Commerce 231
Letter of Sir William Armstrong, C.B. 237
Letter of John Thomson, Esq. 238
Letter of Andrew Johnson, Esq., M.P. 239
On the Distinction between Copyright and Patent-right,
by Mr. Macfie, M.P. 241
On Patent Monopoly, by Mr. Macfie, M.P. 243
A Scheme for International Patents, by Mr. Macfie, M.P. 250
Article from the Times on the Debate in Parliament 251
” ” Economist ” ” 255
” ” Spectator ” ” 259
” ” Saturday Review ” ” 263
Extracts from Recent Periodicals 268
Report of the Cologne Chamber of Commerce 272
Extract from M. Bastiat’s “Harmonies Economiques” 276
Extract from a Letter of M. Paillottet, his Editor 277
Extract from M. Vermeire’s “Le Libre Travail” 277
Extracts showing Movements in Belgium, Germany, and
Holland 278
Extract on Perpetuity of Patent-right, by M. Boudron 281
Extracts on American and British Patent-Law 282
Classification of Patents 283
Illustrations Drawn from the Copper and Iron Trades 284
Note on Working Men as Inventors 286
Note on the Inventors’ Institute 287
Note on State Rewards 288
Note on the Patent-office 289
COPYRIGHT.
Observations on Remunerating Authors by Royalties 293
Suggestions How to Give Effect to this Mode 296
Extracts Showing Mr. Watts’ Opinions on this Mode 297
Chapter from M. Renouard’s “Traité des Droits
d’Auteurs” in Favour of it 301
Extract from Dr. Leavitt’s Cobden Club Essay on
International Copyright 305
Extracts on the State of the Question of Copyright in the
United States and Canada 307
Statement of Mr. Purday on Same Subject 313
Letter from the Same on International Copyright in
Musical Works 314
Extracts from Papers laid before the Canadian
Parliament 316
Tendencies of Copyright Legislation, and Extracts from 320
Recent Bill regarding Copyright in Works of Art, with
Remarks on it
Duties on Books in Several Colonies on Behalf of
Authors 326
On Trade-Marks and the Customs Establishment 328
The Export Book Trade of Various Countries Exhibited 330-331
Extract from the “Beehive” 332
To all who are serving their generation as employers and
employed, in the Arts, Manufactures, and Trades, of Leith,
Musselburgh, and Portobello, and have seen and felt the evils
inherent in the present State method of dealing with Inventions,
these pages are inscribed,—with congratulations that in the front
rank of statesmen, as well within the Cabinet as beyond it, there are
earnest advocates of that emancipation of British productive industry
from artificial restraints which is the needful accompaniment and the
complement of free trade;—and in hope that public attention will now
at length be turned towards procuring such a solution as will satisfy
at same time all just pretensions of meritorious inventors and men of
science.
My own bulky contribution to the attack on the last stronghold of
monopoly is to be regarded as but a rough-and-ready earthwork
thrown up by a pair of willing hands in front of powerful artillery
whose every shot is telling. It comprises the jottings and materials
which I collected for a speech intended to be delivered on 28th May,
when proposing a motion in favour of abolishing Patents for
Inventions.
Notwithstanding imperfections in execution, the present
compilation may acceptably supply a desideratum and prepare the
way for further discussions, and especially for the Committee which
Her Majesty’s Government continue to view with favour and will
heartily support.
R. A. M.
June 9, 1869.
While in the hands of the printer, fresh matter has, through the
kindness of honoured fellow-workers in the cause, reached me
almost daily, part of which is added. The reader will find in this
accession to the testimonies on behalf of freedom of industry,
besides some new arguments, such a striking concurrence and
oneness in the principles enunciated, and even in the illustrations
made use of, as, coming from various quarters independently, may
fairly be regarded as presumptive proof of their accuracy.
The Government has been so good as agree to produce, in
conformity with a request from Parliament, any documents in
possession of the Foreign-office which show the reasons or motives
of the Prussian and Dutch Governments for proposing the abolition
of Patents in Germany and the Netherlands. The adoption in the
latter country of abolition pure and simple, without (so far as I can
see) the slightest indication of a substitute, may well reconcile
professional inventors and all who unite with them to the propositions
with which I close my “speech.” Now that the continental stones are
dropping out of the arch which forms the System of Patents, the rest
cannot long keep their place. The antiquated fabric may be expected
to tumble. For public safety, the sooner Parliament and all concerned
set themselves to take it down, the better.
A communication from Professor Thorold Rogers, and remarks on
a recent Review, are given herewith, the former on account of its
value as a vindication of economic truth and justice, the latter by way
of correcting the reviewer’s accidental mistakes.
The Daily News, in a leading article on the 27th July, having
attached importance altogether undue to a small meeting called
under peculiar circumstances on the 24th, which was supposed to
express opinions and wishes of artisans and operatives,[1] I
addressed letters to that influential paper, which will be found in its
issues of the 29th, 30th, and 31st. Of course Sir Roundell Palmer,
who did the promoter of the meeting the honour to take the chair,
had not, any more than myself, the smallest connexion with its
origination and arrangements.
Appended are suggestions and information regarding Copyright,
which came in my way while in the press about Patent-right, and
which may be useful if international negotiations are contemplated
for one or other or both of these kindred subjects.
I hope imperfections of translation, which I regret, and errors of the
press, for which I take blame without correcting them, will be
indulgently pardoned, as well as faults entirely my own in the
unaccustomed part of advocate and compiler.
July 31.
⁂ No rights are reserved. Mr. Macfie will be glad to be favoured,

at Ashfield Hall, Neston, Chester, with a copy of any transcripts
made or any printed matter illustrating the question of Patents.
[1] When members of “Inventors’ Associations” ask mechanics

to join a crusade against freedom of industry, the best rejoinder is
to ask a statement in writing to show how it can be for the interest
of the millions to perpetuate fetters for the sake of investing a few
hundred individuals with a chance of obtaining personal
advantage by means of the power of fettering.
LETTER FROM PROFESSOR
THOROLD ROGERS.
My dear Sir,—.... The fact is, no one, I presume, wishes to say that
an inventor is undeserving and should go unrewarded. All that the
opponents of the Patent system do say is, that the present
machinery gives the minimum advantage to the inventor, and inflicts
the maximum disadvantage on the public. Besides, in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred, the patentee is only a simultaneous inventor
with a number of others, who lose their labour and ingenuity because
one man happens to get in first....
It has always seemed to me that the weakness of the inventor’s
case lies in the fact already alluded to, that he rarely is the sole
inventor. Hence the fundamental distinction between Invention and
Copyright, though I am no fanatical admirer of the latter privilege.
Now, if a law can confer a right on one person only by inflicting a
wrong on a number of other persons, it is intrinsically vicious, and
cannot be defended on the ground of its intentional goodness.
Yours faithfully,
James C. Thorold Rogers.
July 29.
REMARKS ON A RECENT ARTICLE.
The Westminster Review for July contains an article on Patents.
Its proofs should have been corrected with more care. In my answer
to question 1947 in the Royal Commission’s Report, the word
“patented” in the following the Review misprints “neglected:”—
As a matter of fact, patentees have patented things of so

little value.
And in question 1954 a worse mistake is made by substituting

“some” for “none” in the following:—
There being 400 Patents now in existence affecting your

trade, none of which are made use of by you.
I have right also to complain of mistakes which do not originate

with the printer. The following opinions and arguments imputed to me
I disclaim:—
Had Mr. Macfie said this, we should not have been

surprised. It closely resembles his contention that a book
should be protected because it is something tangible,
whereas an invention is something which, if not invisible, is in
the nebulous condition of an idea.
What I wrote will be found below, page 241. My argument is, that
the subjects of Copyright being tangible can be identified as the
author’s production, and nobody else’s; and that the subjects of
Patent-right being modes or plans, belong to the region of ideas
which may easily occur to anybody besides the first inventor.
Again: the reviewer says of Lord Stanley:—
The latter, while supporting Mr. Macfie on the main issue

distinctly repudiated his leading arguments.
This would be strange if true, seeing I coincide in all his Lordship’s

arguments. How, then, can he, twelve pages further on, say again:—
As for Lord Stanley, he did not hesitate to dissent from Mr.

Macfie’s arguments, while giving a qualified support to his
motion.
Perhaps I should object to the following representation:—
It has been proposed to replace Letters Patent by grants

from the national purse. This is to revert to an obsolete
custom. During the eighteenth century it was fairly tried, and
the result should serve as a warning now. Seventy thousand
pounds were distributed among plausible inventors in the
course of fifty years. The advantage to the public was nil. The
encouragement given to impostors was the only tangible
result. Johanna Stephens obtained 5,000l. for disclosing the
secret of her cure for the stone. A Mr. Blake got 2,500l. to
assist him in perfecting his scheme for transporting fish to
London by land, while a Mr. Foden was greatly overpaid with
500l., “to enable him to prosecute a discovery made by him of
a paste as a substitute for wheat-flour.” Give a man a sum of
money for his invention, and you run the risk of paying him
either too much or too little. Give him a Patent, and you
secure the invention for the public, while his remuneration in
money is absolutely determined according to its value.
The system of State-rewards has not been tried. The reviewer’s

cases do not apply. The scheme that I submit could never be abused
so as to sanction such follies. It may not be a generous and royal
way of dealing with inventions, but it is equitable and safe; whereas,
pace the reviewer, the remuneration from a Patent is not at all
“determined according to its value” (that of the invention).
This interesting article is remarkable for what it omits rather than
what it contains. Like almost every, if not every, defence of Patents
which I have seen, it ignores the grand objection to Patents—their
incompatibility with free-trade. From the beginning to the end there is
not in the article the slightest allusion to the hardship they inflict on
British manufacturers in competing with rivals in home, and
especially in foreign, markets. Reformers of the Patent system fail to
realise this—that no conceivable mere improvement, even, though it
should clear away the present encumbrance of a multiplicity of trifling
Patents, can be more than an alleviation of the mischief now done.
The remaining few would be the most important and valuable ones,
and therefore the most burdensome, because those which, on
account of the heavy royalties that will be legally claimed, must
subject British manufacturers to the largest pecuniary exactions—
exactions that they cannot, but their rivals often would, escape.
The writer of the article has a way of pooh-poohing adverse
arguments, even when he mentions them.
That no two men produce the same book is true. It is

almost as difficult for two men to give to the world two
inventions identical in every detail, and equally well-fitted to
subserve the same end. Much has been said about the ease
with which this may be done, but authentic proofs are lacking
of this having been done on a large scale.
And
Again, then, we ask for proofs of the allegation that six men
are often on the track of the self-same invention.
Why, the simultaneousness, or rapid succession, of identical

inventions is notorious.
He goes in the face of the strongest evidence when he says—
It is doubtful even if these objectionable Patents do any real

harm. An invention which will answer no purpose is simply
useless, whether it be patented or not.
And, elsewhere,
The truth must not be blinked that, if a multiplicity of

worthless Patents be an evil, if the profits of manufacturers
are diminished owing to the battle they have to fight with
patentees, if the bestowal of Patent-right be the source of
mischief and the occasion of pecuniary loss, the like
complaint may be laid at the door of Copyright, and its
abolition might be demanded with as great a show of fairness.
How lightly he can regard arguments of his opponents is also seen

in the following passage:—
Another of Lord Stanley’s objections is that the right man

hardly ever gets the reward. As he puts it, litigation being
costly, and the grant of Patent-right merely amounting to
permission to take legal proceedings against infringers, the
poor man has no chance of asserting and defending his
rights. “If a poor inventor took out a Patent, and the Patent
promised to be productive, in nine cases out of ten he was
obliged to sell it to some one who could command capital
enough to defend it in a court of law.” We submit this proves
nothing more than that the poor inventor, in nine cases out of
ten, deserves our pity. But then, if these nine inventors are
unfortunate, that does not justify the ill-treatment of the tenth.
The source of the writer’s idea, that cessation of Patents is ill-

treatment, lies in the assumption which pervades the whole article,
that to inventors belongs property in inventions—i.e., exclusive right
of property; or, in other words, right to require the State to use its
power to prevent other persons from doing what they do, and what
every other man has a natural and inalienable right to do.
Still further: shutting his eyes to the difficulty of mollifying the
grievance of invention monopoly by means of “compulsory licences,”
which the Royal Commission declared they found no way of
rendering practicable—and, I add, if practicable, would be no cure of
the evils, which are radical—he writes—
If to this were added a system of compulsory licences, the

amount of royalty to be determined by a tribunal, in the event
of the parties failing to come to terms, nearly all the really
serious and valid objections to the working of a Patent-Law
would be obviated.
Yet, believing himself the friend of the public, in spite of all the
strong arguments against his views and the little he himself adduces
for them, he very complacently tells us—
Speaking on behalf of the public, we maintain that a Patent-

Law is necessary in any uncivilised community, because,
without its protection, industry cannot flourish, and ingenuity
can have no scope for its triumphs.
The reviewer can hardly have consulted any practical man when
he pronounces it—
absurd to plead that a Patent has been infringed in ignorance,

when it is certain that the ignorance, if not wilful, is wholly
inexcusable.
Undoubtedly, infringements often are not acts done blamelessly in

ignorance; still, I would be surprised in most cases if the infringer
knew he was infringing. He is not likely to know it in making trivial
improvements, for how can he know without subjecting himself to no
small trouble and expense, such as ought not to be laid upon him.
There is an important point as to which the reviewer and I perhaps
differ, “the extent to which Letters Patent give a monopoly in ideas.”
The fact is, that the whole breadth of a principle is patentable,
provided any single mode of applying it can be specified.
The reviewer, adverting to the changes which have taken place in
the Law of Patents since the days of Elizabeth, characterises them
as “changes towards greater freedom of action on the part of the
State, and greater liberty of choice on the part of the people.” This, I
confess, I do not understand, except so far as it may mean there has
been less and less control exercised by the State, and more and
more advantage taken of this supineness by all sorts of persons. I
am quite prepared to admit that in my speech I have exhibited rather
a popular than a strictly legal and logical view of the meaning and
legitimate applicability of the words in the statute, “nor mischievous
to the State by raising prices.” All that I maintain is this,—that the
spirit of the proviso is opposed to any individual Patent that keeps
prices up at a level below which, if there were no grant, they might,
by the natural progress of industry, be expected to fall, and to a
Patent system that characteristically has that effect and is also
chargeable with “hurt of trade” and “generally inconvenient.”

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Herder’s Philosophy Michael N.

Select Bibliography 315

This book attempts to give an overview of Herder’s philosophy. It is written out of a

This book is an exploration of the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803).

In 1764 he left Königsberg to take up a schoolteaching position in the Baltic town of

the nature of tragedy, Shakespeare (1773), which appeared in a volume called On

Another peculiarity of Herder’s philosophical texts that may initially pose an

He continues to make such statements against systematicity throughout his career,

Herder’s well-grounded hostility to this type of systematicity helped to establish

General Program in Philosophy

Dreams of a Spirit Seer, where it is indebted to British moral philosophy, especially

The Origin of Language

Three Fundamental Principles

of Plato), or subjective mental ideas (à la Locke, Hume, or Condillac), but

guarantees that a person’s use of language is bound to be a reliable indicator of the

Speech, Thought’s Canal! Speech, Thought’s Criterion too.

of (rational) thought on language, into a conceptual argument, which therefore can

Thus, concerning the positive equation of meanings or concepts with word-usages

Title: Recent discussions on the abolition of patents for inventions in

Release date: November 11, 2023 [eBook #72096]

Original publication: London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer,

Credits: Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed Proofreading

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECENT

Evidence, Speeches, and Papers in its

“Selon moi donc, le char du progres social doit être mu par

⁂ No rights are reserved. Mr. Macfie will be glad to be favoured,

[1] When members of “Inventors’ Associations” ask mechanics

As a matter of fact, patentees have patented things of so

And in question 1954 a worse mistake is made by substituting

There being 400 Patents now in existence affecting your

I have right also to complain of mistakes which do not originate

Had Mr. Macfie said this, we should not have been

The latter, while supporting Mr. Macfie on the main issue

This would be strange if true, seeing I coincide in all his Lordship’s

As for Lord Stanley, he did not hesitate to dissent from Mr.

Perhaps I should object to the following representation:—

It has been proposed to replace Letters Patent by grants

The system of State-rewards has not been tried. The reviewer’s

That no two men produce the same book is true. It is

Why, the simultaneousness, or rapid succession, of identical

It is doubtful even if these objectionable Patents do any real

The truth must not be blinked that, if a multiplicity of

How lightly he can regard arguments of his opponents is also seen

Another of Lord Stanley’s objections is that the right man

The source of the writer’s idea, that cessation of Patents is ill-

If to this were added a system of compulsory licences, the

Speaking on behalf of the public, we maintain that a Patent-

absurd to plead that a Patent has been infringed in ignorance,

Undoubtedly, infringements often are not acts done blamelessly in

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Select Bibliography 315