The harmonious man is to be the product of a natural unfolding of innate human nature. The potentialities within are to be allowed to develop unwarped and unimpeded and to express themselves completely and symmetrically. There must be no subordination of personality or individuality to artificial standards, for nature is the sovereign. If no powers, inclinations, or impulses are thwarted in their trend and activity, they will, in all their manifold variety, flower into the perfectly beautiful and therefore the perfectly good. Now the variety of nature is such as to distinguish everything she forms by a peculiar, original character, which, if strictly observed, will make the subject appear unlike to anything extant in the world besides. For all beauty is truth. True features make the beauty of a face, and true proportions the beauty of architecture—_Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor_, Part IV. That faculty by which the good and the beautiful are to be recognized and approved is indeed little different if different at all from an emotion. The principle of feeling really becomes the criterion of right and wrong. It is the principle of feeling which forms the essence of Shaftesbury’s _Moral Sense_. He admits that this sense may be improved by cultivation, but its essential part is innate. “Sense of right and wrong” is as natural to us as natural affection itself, and a first principle in our constitution. The two ideas which we are considering here as a part of Shaftesbury’s philosophy are the development of the individual and his harmonious relation to the whole of mankind. These ideas are made the nucleus of a collection of writings and reviews by Herder which he calls _Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität_. These have been considered to some extent in a preceding chapter as a part of Herder’s system of thought, but the purpose here is to connect the same with that of Shaftesbury.—_Dritte Sammlung_, Brief 27 ff. At the outset in this letter the author is concerned with the distinction between the following: 1. Menschheit: Menschen sind wir allesamt ... wir gehören zur Menschheit. 2. Mensch, Menschlichkeit: Leider hat man in unserer Sprache dem Wort Mensch, und noch mehr dem barmherzigen Wort Menschlichkeit so oft eine Nebenbedeutung von Niedrigkeit, Schwäche und falschem Mitleid angehängt. 3. Menschenrechte: Kann ohne Menschenpflichten nicht genannt werden. 4. Menschenwürde: Das Menschengeschlecht ... hat seinem grössesten Theil nach keine Würde.... Es soll aber zum Charakter seines Geschlechtes, mithin auch zu dessen Werth und Würde gebildet werden. 5. Menschenliebe: Das schöne Wort Menschenliebe is so trivial worden, dass man meistens die Menschen liebt um keinen unter den Menschen wirksam zu lieben.