The publication of the Nouveaux Essais in 1765 induced some thinkers to turn from the dry bones of Wolf to the spirit of Leibnitz himself.  And at the same time French thought was penetrating.  In consequence of these influences the final phase of the German “Illumination” is marked by the appearance of two or three works in which Progress is a predominating idea.

We see this reaction against Wolf and his static school in a little work published by Herder in 1774—­“a philosophy of history for the cultivation of mankind.”  There is continuous development, he declares, and one people builds upon the work of another.  We must judge past ages, not by the present, but relatively to their own particular conditions.  What exists now was never possible before, for everything that man accomplishes is conditioned by time, climate, and circumstances.

Six years later Lessing’s pamphlet on the Education of the Human Race appeared, couched in the form of aphoristic statements, and to a modern reader, one may venture to say, singularly wanting in argumentative force.  The thesis is that the drama of history is to be explained as the education of man by a progressive series of religions, a series not yet complete, for the future will produce another revelation to lift him to a higher plane than that to which Christ has drawn him up.  This interpretation of history proclaimed Progress, but assumed an ideal and applied a measure very different from those of the French philosophers.  The goal is not social happiness, but a full comprehension of God.  Philosophy of religion is made the key to the philosophy of history.  The work does not amount to more than a suggestion for a new synthesis, but it was opportune and arresting.

Herder meanwhile had been thinking, and in 1784 he gave the German world his survey of man’s career—­Ideas of the Philosophy of the History of Humanity.  In this famous work, in which we can mark the influence of French thinkers, especially Montesquieu, as well as of Leibnitz, he attempted, though on very different lines, the same task which Turgot and Condorcet planned, a universal history of civilisation.

The Deity designed the world but never interferes in its process, either in the physical cosmos or in human history.  Human history itself, civilisation, is a purely natural phenomenon.  Events are strictly enchained; continuity is unbroken; what happened at any given time could have happened only then, and nothing else could have happened.  Herder’s rigid determinism not only excludes Voltaire’s chance but also suppresses the free play of man’s intelligent will.  Man cannot guide his own destinies; his actions and fortunes are determined by the nature of things, his physical organisation and physical environment.  The fact that God exists in inactive ease hardly affects the fatalistic complexion of this philosophy; but it is perhaps a mitigation that the world was made for man; humanity is its final cause.