In Herder[1] (1744-1803:  after 1776 Superintendent-General in Weimar) the philosophy of feeling gained a finer, more perspicuous and harmonious nature, who shared Lessing’s interest in history and his tendency to hold fast equally to pantheism and to individualism.  God is the all-one, infinite, spiritual (non-personal) primal force, which wholly reveals itself in each thing (God:  Dialogues on the System of Spinoza, 1787).  To the life, power, wisdom, and goodness of God correspond the life and perfection of the universe and of individual creatures, each of which possesses its own irreplaceable value and bears in itself its future in germ.  Everywhere, one and the same life in an ascending series of powers and forms with imperceptible transitions.  Always, an inner and an outer together; no power without organ, no spirit without a body.  As thought is only a higher stage of sensation, which develops from the lower by means of language—­reason, like sense, is not a productive but a receptive faculty of knowing, perceiving ("Vernehmen")—­so the free process of history is only the continuation and completion of the nature-process (Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 1784 seq.).  Man, the last child of nature and her first freedman, is the nodal point where the physical series of events changes into the ethical; the last member of the organisms of earth is at the same time the first in the spiritual development.  The mission of history is the unfolding of all the powers which nature has concentrated in man as the compendium of the world; its law, that everywhere on our earth everything be realized that can be realized there; its end, humanity and the harmonious development of all our capacities.  As nature forms a single great organism, and from the stone to man describes a connected development, so humanity is a one great individual which passes through its several ages, from infancy (the Orient), through boyhood (Eygpt and Phoenicia), youth (Greece), and manhood (Rome), to old age (the Christian world).  The spirit stands in the closest dependence upon nature, and nature is concerned in history throughout.  The finer organization of his brain, the possession of hands, above all, his erect position, make man, man and endow him with reason.  Similarly it is natural conditions, climate, the character of the soil, the surrounding animal and vegetable life, etc., that play an essential part in determining the manners, the characters, and the destinies of nations.  The connection of nature with history by means of the concept of development and through the idea that the two merely represent different stages of the same fundamental process, made Herder the forerunner of Schelling.

[Footnote 1:  On Herder cf. the biography by R. Haym, 2 vols., 1877, 1885; and the work by Witte which has been referred to above (p. 306, note).]