Es verdient fast nicht bemerkt zu werden ... dass man die poetischen Bilder und Empfindungen keines Volks und keiner Zeit nach dem Regelmaas eines andern Volks, einer andern Zeit zu beurteilen, zu tadeln, zu verwerfen habe.[29] CHAPTER V FOUNDATIONS OF INDIVIDUALITY AND PERSONALITY IN HERDER Herder as philosopher was concerned more with practical and concrete applications of his principles than with dogmas and abstract theories. The following brief investigation of purely philosophical discussions is made with a view of determining how he applies his philosophy to this definite anthropological conception. In his _Gespräche über Spinozas System_ Herder sets forth much of his own religious philosophy. A passage in the second dialogue substitutes for the word “attributes” the word “forces” in expounding one of Spinoza’s postulates. The passage then reads: “The Godhead reveals itself in an infinite number of forces and in an infinite number of ways.” It is with the word for forces that we are concerned at this point—_Kraft_, _Kräfte_. This same word Herder uses in discussing the fundamental life-principle in the world at large, which is the theme of his first few sections in the essay entitled: _Vom Erkennen und Empfinden in ihrem menschlichen Ursprunge und den Gesetzen ihrer Würkung_. These _Kräfte_, these “modifications of God,” find their impulse to operate in a stimulus, beyond the material form of which Herder cannot go. Herder’s philosophy plants itself from the beginning quite firmly on material foundations. He says that in the qualities which are constantly designated by such words as heavy, thrust, fall, movement, rest, strength, even power of inertia, is implied a life-principle, a soul. Any close observation of nature must show that the great working power of nature is everywhere the same, and it is the analogy between the processes of the material world in general and the phenomena in the human organism in particular which can give the clearest insight into the great life-principle. This study by analogous reasoning is not artificial, Man cannot avoid feeling the similarity between himself and external nature. Human beings must of necessity, he continues, vitalize everything about them with their own feelings. The feelings then are strongly instrumental in man’s interpretation of the world about him. I. STIMULUS