Amongst these one of the most interesting and influential was Herder. Herder, who had been amongst Kant's students in 1763, and who has expressed his admiration of his then teacher, came as years passed-by to consider himself the appointed antagonist of the Kantian system. The two men were mentally and morally of different types: and in Herder's case, a sense of injury, in the end, positively blinded him to the meaning no less than to the merits of a doctrine he had decreed to be pernicious. In Herder's opinion, the Kantian system laboured throughout from the fault of a dead logical formalism and abstractness: it inhabited a sort of limbo, cut off alike from the fresh breath of nature and the growing life of history, and from the eternal spirit of divine truth: it undermined (so his experience at Weimar[1] indicated) the traditional faith, and inspired its 'adepts' with a revolutionary superciliousness to all dogma. Its cut-and-dried logicality, its trenchant divisions and analyses were obnoxious to his poetically-fervid, largely-enthusiastic, and essentially-historical soul. Man--in his concrete completeness, in his physical surroundings and his corporeal structure, in his social organisation, in his literary and artistic life, above all in his poetry and traditions of religion--was the theme of his studies; and he looked with distrust on every attempt to analyse and disintegrate the total unity of humanity by a criticism first of this, and then a criticism of that side of it, carried on separately. Ossian had been an early favourite of his; and the twilight that hovers with the haze of pensive myth around the figures of that visionary world hangs with a charm and a confusion around the ultimate horizon of Herder's ideas.