In 1774 and 1775 Herder wrote and wrote again an essay (published 1778) for a prize offered by the Berlin Academy on the subject of 'Sensation and Cognition in the human Soul.' Its fundamental points are that 'no psychology is possible, which is not at every step a distinct physiology': that 'cognition and volition are only _one_ energy of the soul': that 'all our thought has arisen out of and through sensation, and in spite of all distillation still contains copious traces of it': that there are not separate faculties of thought, but one divine power, which unifies all the broad stream of inflowing sensation,--'one energy, and elasticity of the soul, which reaches its height through the medium of language.' 'What is material, what non-material in man, I know not,' he says; 'but I am in the faith that nature has not fastened iron plates between them,' 'Man is a slave of mechanism (but a mechanism disguised in the garb of a lucid celestial reason) and fancies himself free,' 'Self-feeling and fellow-feeling (a new phase of expansion and contraction) are the two expressions of the elasticity of our will': they vary directly with each other: and 'love therefore is the highest reason'--a proposition, adds Herder, for which 'if we will not trust St. John, we may trust the undoubtedly more divine Spinoza, whose philosophy and ethics turn wholly upon this axis.' Herder's great work, however,--which, side by side with Lessing's _Education of the Human Race,_ and with Kant's _Idea for a Universal History_, helped to constitute that conception of history, as philosophy in concrete form, which appears in Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel,--was the _Ideas for a Philosophy of History._ It is the pendant and contrast to Kant's three Criticisms, with which it is nearly contemporaneous (1784-91). Even in history Kant emphasises the work of intelligence, of reason: and puts the intelligently-organised state--if possible, the world-commonwealth, when war shall be transformed into merely stimulating competition,--as the final triumph of the reason. To Herder, while on the one hand the nature-basis is all-essential, and must form the foundation of any genetic explanation of spiritual phenomena, the ideal of humanity presents itself rather as a free development of the many-sided individual--a development tempered by the association of the family and the claims of friendship. In Kant's view of civilisation, natural reason by its indwelling presuppositions works out the end of culture: Herder, on the contrary, allows himself to introduce--but only in and from the dim background--a supernatural aid to actualise the germs of rationality latent in man's nature. Yet, though at the first step into history the Godhead appears, and a deified humanity looms ahead as the consummation of the process of evolution, the development between these two extreme poles is homogeneous and indeed one. The same law governs it throughout: