Born into a religious family in East Prussia, Johann Gottfried von Herder became an innovator in the philosophy of history and culture and a leading figure of the Sturm and Drang literary movement. His father was a schoolmaster in the town of Mohrongen, where he was born on August 25, 1744. He was able to obtain a university education, in the capital city of Konigsberg, through a surgeon in the then occupying Russian army who offered to be the young man's patron. Herder decided on a medical career but changed his mind when he fainted at every operation he attended. Changing to theology, during this period, Herder came into contact with Immanuel Kant, founder of critical philosophy, and Johann Georg Hamann, a prominent critic of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In 1764, Herder went to Riga to teach and preach. He remained there until...