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the past with a very different spirit from Voltaire : without his wit and his withering- irony , he had , in place of it , a warmer benevolence and more diffusive sympathy . Wherever his eye rested on man , he found something to admire and love , some indication of high descent and immortal destiny ; some form of goodness , some image of peace and bliss : from the rudest hut
of the savage , and breathed forth in the simplest and most inartificial accents , the voice of humanity was still music to his ear . With Condorcet he rejoiced to anticipate a brighter futurity ; but it was not a futurity , of which a few only of the race should partake , a futurity * won after thousands of years by the successive triumphs of science ; but a futurity assured to all good men ,
as the crown of victorious virtue . While Condorcet looked upon the past as a blank , and thought that men would then only begin to live , when his own schemes of perfection were brought to pass , Herder delighted to believe , that in every stage of society the purpose of individual existence might be fulfilled , the capacities of our moral nature be unfolded , and the preparation for immortality be carried on . His philosophy is even carried to an extreme on this point . He was inclined to view , with perhaps too
much complacency , the traditional forms and usages of a people , and shrunk with peculiar sensitiveness from all sweeping innovations and violent interruptions of the established course of society . Yet this did not arise from any indifference to the liberties and happiness of mankind . One , who more honoured human nature , whose heart more deeply sympathised with its wrongs , or beat higher with generous hopes and wishes for its emancipation and improvement , never gave his thoughts to posterity . It was his zeal for the culture of individual man , and his distrust in theories
relating to the species , which made him attach so much value to the influences of climate , situation , and tradition ; which led him to believe , that in every age , and in every country , there was a certain course marked out by circumstances , a prescribed process of discipline through which men must pass in their progress to perfection , and from which there could be no deviation with impunity . Place , time , need , tradition , these are the causes , which , he repeats again and again , necessarily determine the actions and characters of men . For this reason , he has been
considered by some as the father of the Ecole fataliste of modern French historians . But there is no fatalism , properly so called , in the philosophy of Herder ; because , though he often expresses himself vaguely and obscurely , yet in the belief , which he inculcates , of the constant tendency of all things to good , he makes
the advancement oi society to depend on the free choice and voluntary co-operation * of individual man . He conceived , however , that improvement could not be forced ; and that the progress of the future must be regulated in great measure by the course of the past . He did not , like Voltaire , content himself
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232 The Philosophy of the History of Mankind .
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1832, page 232, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1810/page/16/
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