'Ethics is only a higher physics of the mind.' Man is from the first endowed with tendencies which, through the medium of society and tradition, carry him on to the double end, so hard to combine, of 'humanity and happiness,' 'humanity and religion.' But, for this training of the spirit he is prepared by a special natural endowment of the body: and Herder can go so far as to say that 'in order to delineate the duties of man, we need only delineate his form.' Developing under the influence of cosmic and geographical conditions, and formed of the same protoplasm and on the same type as other animals, man possesses an unique organisation, a definitely proportioned mechanism, which is his distinctive and permanent specific character. General identity of plan and condition prevails for man and animals; but Herder keeps back from the Darwinian inference which interprets the graduated diversity of type as indicating that man is the phase reached _pro tempore_ in the gradual slide along which the continuous change of environment carries the unstable types which earlier environments have helped to form. For Herder's conception of nature there are fixed differences beyond which research cannot go; and we shall see that both Schelling and Hegel accept this reservation. Herder, finally, struck a blow in the war that was waged after Lessing's death between the friends and foes of Spinozism. His little book _God_ (1787) is a vindication v of Spinoza against Jacobi's attack. Antiquarian accuracy it can lay no claim to: the picture of Spinozism, one-sided at the best, is further vitiated by an interpretation of the doctrine which leavens it to indistinctness with the ideas of Leibniz and Shaftesbury. It was a grand--but it was also an audacious--vision of Spinozism which found it not inconsistent with a fundamental theism on one side and with the poetry of nature on the other. Yet Herder had the merit of being perhaps the first to pierce the hard logical shell of rationalism under which Spinoza had lain hidden, and to reveal the mystic passion for God which so quaintly called itself _amor erga rem infinitam et aeternam._ 'Spinoza,' says Herder, 'was an enthusiast for the being of God,' Even where he translates Spinoza's terms into ample equivalents, he does service by teaching men that the vapid inanities they associate with terms like _substance_, _mode, cause_, are inadequate to interpret the intensity of meaning they had for the philosopher. To remove the seals which rendered both Leibniz and Spinoza a mystery for the world was to prepare the way for Schelling and Hegel[2].