JOHANN GOTTFRIED VON, was born in Mohrungen, East Prussia, on the 25th of August 1744. His father, Gottfried Herder, kept in that town a female school, and performed some of the more servile duties connected with public worship in the Polish church. He was an earnest man, with a strong sense of duty, and so relied on for soundness of judgment, that his neighbours were accustomed to repair to him in matters of difficulty and dispute.

Johann received his early education in the town school, which was conducted by a teacher proverbial for his austerity. In school and out of school he was the most diligent of pupils—carrying his books with him wherever he went, and laying them aside with reluctance even at meals. If, in passing through the town, he noticed a book lying in a window, he forthwith borrowed it. When fifteen years of age he was employed as amanuensis by the pastor of Mohrungen. Considering the narrow means of his parents the pastor at first dissuaded him from study. Having chanced, however, to enter Herder's bedroom one night, and finding that the youth had been in the habit of paying nocturnal visits to his library, and occupying himself with the spoils till dawn, he encouraged him in his studies, and gave him exemption from tasks which had been imposed with the view of changing the bent of his inclinations. In this situation Herder continued for several years; and some verses which he here composed drew at the time the attention, and subsequently the patronage of a publisher in Königsberg. In his eighteenth year the surgeon of a Russian regiment which had taken up winter quarters in Mohrungen met him at the pastor's house, and was so favourably impressed with his appearance that he offered to place him at a university, and train him to the medical profession. Herder was accordingly removed to Königsberg, but as a fit of fainting signalized his debut in the anatomy class-room, the pursuit of medicine was relinquished in favour of the more congenial study of theology. This placed it beyond the power of his patron to render him further assistance; and, left to his own resources, Herder maintained himself during his university course. He devoted the greater part of his attention to classical literature and belles lettres, and was permitted by Kant to attend his lectures gratis. In 1763 he became a teacher in the Collegium Fredericianum, and at the close of 1764 removed to Riga, where he had received a call to assist in the cathedral school. He was at the same time licensed to preach, and shortly after (1767) commenced his career as author with the publication of Fragments on German Literature. This work attracted the notice of some of the leading minds of Germany. Winckelmann wrote from Rome to Heyne:—"What new Pindar is this that has arisen amongst us?" That same year he received and refused an invitation from Petersburg to the office of rector of the Peter's school there; and the council of Riga presented him to a ministerial charge which they had created on purpose to retain his services. He was ordained, June 10, 1767. He proved an excellent teacher, and was a great favourite with his pupils; and his eloquence and earnestness rendered him as acceptable in the pulpit as he was in the class-room. He left Riga in 1769, and after some time spent, first in travelling, chiefly in France, and then in the office of tutor to the prince of Holstein, accepted the office of court-chaplain in Bückeburg and member of the highest ecclesiastical court. During his residence here he was married. He complains that the Count of Bückeburg and he did not very well understand each other, and that his situation was more nominal than real; for he was a pastor without a flock, minister of education without schools, and head of the chief ecclesiastical court without a court over which to preside.

He received, in 1771, from the Academy of Berlin, the prize offered for the best paper on the Origin of Language, and another in 1774 from the same institute, for a paper on the Causes which vitiate National Taste. In 1776 he went to Weimar as general-superintendent (an ecclesiastical office), and continued in place there till his death. Enemies had spread reports detrimental to his reputation for eloquence; but his first sermon in Weimar took all hearers by surprise, and established his fame as a pulpit orator. That city was then the residence of Goethe, Wieland, and others of the leading literary men of the day, and afforded him ample opportunities for the prosecution of his plans. He entered with vigour on the duties of his situation, and was again and again invested with new offices, till at length he was at one and the same time chief chaplain in ordinary to the duke, general-superintendent, first minister of the town church, vice-president and virtual president of the highest ecclesiastical court, and ephorus of schools. In spite of obstacles he persevered in the work of reforming schools and improving the condition of schoolmasters, until he had raised the standard and status of education throughout the duke's dominions. Amongst the prizes which he received while here, from various scientific bodies, was a third one from the Academy of Berlin for a paper on the Influence of Governments upon the Sciences. He died at Weimar, 18th December 1803.

Herder's own poetical productions are not now rated so high as they were on their first appearance. He is not so much regarded as having added to the poetical literature of his country, as having effected a reformation in literary effort and taste, and in this respect his merits are of the highest order. He entered upon the scene just as that crisis in the history of German literature, known by the name of the "storm and stress," was at its height. For about a century and a half the main current of German poetry, and not a little of its prose, had consisted in bald and spiritless imitations, now of Italian and English, and now of French authorship, according as the one or the other was in the ascendant. The exposure of this state of matters made by the clear and acute criticisms of Lessing, and the thoroughly original and national poetry of Klopstock, conspired at the time to unsettle the minds of the numerous aspirants to poetical fame. They had accompanied Lessing when he showed where poetry was not; they had not patience to follow him as he pointed out where it was. They made a general and indiscriminate rejection of the claims of any existing poetry to respect, and broke loose from the maxims and rules which had been founded upon it. A universal return was to be made to the first starting-point of poetry, and this time she was to keep to the proper path. But as the reformers of poetry had each his own starting-point and his own maxims, the lavish expenditure of earnestness and effort which followed resulted only in a fertile crop of whims and absurdities. At this juncture Herder stepped forward. His fine, steady sense of the beautiful, not easily blunted or beguiled, his ready perception of the presence of genuine feeling, and the vast extent of his literary acquirements, guided him to a generally correct decision as to the true poets of different countries and different times. Though not himself possessed of the philosophic acuteness and comprehensiveness of mind requisite for generalizing the principles of criticism, he could understand and appreciate them when thought out for him; and the productions which approved themselves to his own taste, coincided for the most part with those which could stand the test of the criticism of Lessing. Thus doubly fortified in his views, he prepared for action. He brought in succession, and kept steadily before the eyes of his countrymen, Moses, Homer, Shakspeare, and the old popular singers of his own and other countries; he applied to the productions of these men the principles of criticism which Lessing had evolved; he did all this in a clear, elegant, flowing style, and there was no resisting the influence of such a concentration of light. Men were aroused to a careful and intelligent study of the great models of art, and Herder continued to hold the helm, until the appearance of Schiller's "Ridders" in 1781 announced that the "storm and stress" were fairly weathered.

Of a similar kind is the service which Herder has rendered to philosophy and history. In poetry he restored the old path; here he has opened a new one. The human race, from its commencement up to the present hour, has always been parcelled out into more or less distinctly defined communities, and these communities have varied in numbers, power, wealth, knowledge, and other particulars. It is the office of history to describe the communities which have arisen at different times, the variations or changes which have taken place in their respective conditions, and the leading agents or causes by whom these changes have been effected. History, as thus understood, is simply a record of the experience of the race, and, up to the time of Herder, upon this principle history was written. The new mode of treatment which he introduced consisted in inquiring whether there are any general principles upon which the mass of facts disclosed by history can be explained. Are these facts to be regarded as no more than a series of events connected together by what may be implied in succession in time, or are they the result of a closer, though perhaps, of a more secret—of an organic connection? Herder adopted the latter of these views; he named the science which investigates and unfolds it the Philosophy of History; and his own labours in this department are contained in his Contributions towards the Philosophy of the History of Mankind.

These Contributions constitute the only service of note which Herder rendered to philosophy, but the service was one of great value. A somewhat similar idea seems to have crossed the mind of Vico, but Herder was the first to grasp it firmly and give it a place and rank among the departments of scientific inquiry. He was so much disposed, however, to speculate—to deduce conclusions from illegitimately postulated principles, and so little disposed rigidly to deduce principles from carefully sifted facts, that his own labours in this province are of no permanent value to science, and he has long been distanced by other workers in the field which he had the honour to open. He is, moreover, too frequently inaccurate in matters of detail to be safely relied on. But we do not go to Herder for details. These defects allowed for, the work is a master-piece. To read the impressions which facts, in the main correct, left upon Herder's mind is a brisk mental stimulant; and the book merits the praise implied in the advice of Cousin, "strong men are nourished by strong books; read Herder's Ideen."

In the province of theology proper, Herder accomplished nothing. He had made no systematic study of it. He approached Christianity just as he had approached Homer and Shakspeare, and was occupied not so much with the substance of Christian doctrines as with the esthetics of Christian morality. As he gives no evidence of having acquired a deep practical acquaintance with Christianity, or of having made a thorough investigation of its doctrines, he cannot be fairly assigned a place in any of the classes into which those who have done either may be divided. So far as his views went, however, they were substantially Socinian. This is especially true of his later productions. In his earlier writings there is much that is useful, with good feeling and many correct views. Of this kind are his Oldest Records of the Human Race; Letters on the Study of Theology; and Remarks on the New Testament, from recently opened Oriental Sources. His works on The Redeemer, and the Resurrection of Christ, contained scarcely anything inconsistent with a chronic Socinianism. His Letters on Hebrew Poetry are justly celebrated as an analysis of the aesthetics of the poetical parts of the Old Testament. Herder's works are edited by Julius G. Müller, in 40 vols. 12mo. (n. m. p.)