At a period in his life when Herder had undergone conversion to court orthodoxy at Bückeburg and threatened to throw away that for which his life had stood, he was greatly helped by Goethe. The identification of Herder with Christianity continued to be more deep and direct than that of Goethe ever became, yet Goethe has also his measure of significance for our theme. If he steadied Herder in his religious experience, he steadied others in their poetical emotionalism and artistic sentimentality, which were fast becoming vices of the time. The classic repose of his spirit, his apparently unconscious illustration of the ancient maxim, 'nothing too much,' was the more remarkable, because there were few influences in the whole gamut of human life to which he did not sooner or later surrender himself, few experiences which he did not seek, few areas of thought upon which he did not enter. Systems and theories were never much to his mind. A fact, even if it were inexplicable, interested him much more. To the evolution of formal thought in his age he held himself receptive rather than directing. He kept, to the last, his own manner of brooding and creating, within the limits of a poetic impressionableness which instinctively viewed the material world and the life of the soul in substantially similar fashion. There is something almost humorous in the way in which he eagerly appropriated the results of the philosophising of his time, in so far as he could use these to sustain his own positions, and caustically rejected those which he could not thus use. He soon got by heart the negative lessons of Voltaire and found, to use the words which he puts into the mouth of Faust, that while it freed him from his superstitions, at the same time it made the world empty and dismal beyond endurance. In the mechanical philosophy which presented itself in the _Système de la Nature_ as a positive substitute for his lost faith, he found only that which filled his poet's soul with horror. 'It appeared to us,' he says, 'so grey, so cimmerian and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost. We thought it the very quintessence of old age. All was said to be necessary, and therefore there was no God. Why not a necessity for a God to take its place among the other necessities!' On the other hand, the ordinary teleological theology, with its external architect of the world and its externally determined designs, could not seem to Goethe more satisfactory than the mechanical philosophy. He joined for a time in Rousseau's cry for the return to nature. But Goethe was far too well balanced not to perceive that such a cry may be the expression of a very artificial and sophisticated state of mind. It begins indeed in the desire to throw off that which is really oppressive. It ends in a fretful and reckless revolt against the most necessary conditions of human life. Goethe lived long enough to see in France that dissolution of all authority, whether of State or Church,