![The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14] - Читать Любимую Русскую Полную Книгу 👉 Read-E-Book.com](/uploads/posts/books/4/1/3/0/the-great-events-by-famous-historians-volumes-1-14-download.jpg)
The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]». Краткое содержание книги:
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 01
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 02 / (From the Rise of Greece to the Christian Era)
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 04
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 05 / (From Charlemagne to Frederick Barbarossa)
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 06 / (From Barbarossa to Dante)
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 08 / The Later Renaissance: from Gutenberg to the Reformation
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 09
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 10
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 13
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 14
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 17
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21 / The Recent Days (1910-1914)
Herder, I repeat, is certainly neither a classical nor a finished writer. He has no doubt gone out of fashion, because his style is pompous and diffuse, his composition loose or fragmentary; because his reasoning lacks firmness and his erudition solidity. Still, no other German writer of note exercised the important indirect influence which was exercised by Herder. In this I do not allude to Schelling and his philosophy, which received more than one impulse from Herder's ideas; nor to Hegel, who reduced them to a metaphysical system and defended them with his wonderful dialectics. But F.A. Wolf, when he points out to us in Homer the process of epic poetry; Niebuhr, in revealing to us the growth of Rome, the birth of her religious and national legends, the slow, gradual formation of her marvellous constitution; Savigny, when he proves that the Roman civil law, that masterpiece of human ingenuity, was not the work of a wise legislator, but rather the wisdom of generations and of centuries; Eichhorn, when he wrote the history of German law and created thereby a new branch of historical science which has proved one of the most fertile; A.W. Schlegel and his school, when they transplanted all the poetry of other nations to Germany by means of imitations which are real wonders of assimilation; Frederick Schlegel, when, in the Wisdom of the Hindoos he opened out that vast field of comparative linguistic science, which Bopp and so many others have since cultivated with such success; Alexander von Humboldt and Karl Ritter, when they gave a new life to geography by showing the earth in its growth and development and coherence; W. von Humboldt, when he established the laws of language as well as those of self-government; Jacob Grimm, when he brought German philology into existence, while his brother Wilhelm made a science of Northern mythology; still later on, D.F. Strauss, when, in the days of our own youth, he placed the myth and the legend, with their unconscious origin and growth, not alone in opposition to the idea of Deity intervening to interrupt established order, but also to that of imposture and conscious fraud; Otfr. Mueller, when he proved that Greek mythology, far from containing moral abstractions or historical facts, is the involuntary personification of surrounding nature, subsequently developed by imagination; Max Mueller, even, when he creates the new science of comparative mythology—what else are they doing but applying and working out Herder's ideas? And if we turn our eyes to other nations, what else were Burke and Coleridge, B. Constant and A. Thierry, Guizot and A. de Tocqueville—what are Renan and Taine, Carlyle and Darwin doing, each in his own branch, but applying and developing Herder's two fundamental principles, that of organic evolution and that of the entireness of the individual? For it was Herder who discovered the true spirit of history, and in this sense it is that Goethe was justified in saying of him:
"A noble mind, desirous of fathoming man's soul in whatever direction it may shoot forth, searcheth throughout the universe for sound and word which flow through the lands in a thousand sources and brooks; wanders through the oldest as the newest regions and listens in every zone." "He knew how to find this soul wherever it lay hid, whether robed in grave disguise, or lightly clothed in the garb of play, in order to found for the future this lofty rule: Humanity be our eternal aim!"
Among the young literary rebels who, under Herder's guidance, attempted, toward and after 1775, to overthrow all conventionalism, all authority, even all law and rule, in order to put in their stead the absolute self-government of genius, freed from all tutorship—the foremost were the two greatest German poets, Goethe and Schiller. Goethe's Goetz and Werther, Schiller's Brigands and Cabal and Love, were greeted as the promising forerunners of the national literature to come. Their subjects were German and modern, not French or classic; in their plan they affected Shakespearean liberty; in their language they were at once familiar, strong, and original; in their inspiration they were protests against the social prejudices and political abuses of the time, vehement outbursts of individuality against convention.
Not twenty years had passed away, when both the revolutionists had become calm and resigned liberal conservatives, who understood and taught that liberty is possible only under the empire of law; that the real world with all its limits had a right as well as the inner world, which knows no frontiers; that to be completely free man must fly into the ideal sphere of art, science, or formless religion. Not that they abjured "the dreams of their youth." The nucleus of their new creed was contained in their first belief; but it had been developed into a system of social views more in harmony with society and its exigencies, of æsthetic opinions more independent of reality and its accidents, of philosophical ideas more speculative and methodical. In other words, Goethe and Schiller never ceased to believe, as they had done at twenty, that all vital creations in nature as in society are the result of growth and organic development, not of intentional, self-conscious planning, and that individuals on their part act powerfully only through their nature in its entirety, not through one faculty alone, such as reason or will, separated from instinct, imagination, temperament, passion, etc. Only they came to the conviction that here existed general laws which presided over organic development, and that there was a means of furthering in the individual the harmony between temperament, character, understanding, and imagination, without sacrificing one to the others. Hence they shaped for themselves a general view of nature and mankind, society and history, which may not have become the permanent view of the whole nation; but which for a time was predominant, which even now is still held by many, and which in some respects will always be the ideal of the best men in Germany, even when circumstances have wrought a change in the intellectual and social conditions of their country, so as to necessitate a total transformation and accommodation of those views.
We cannot regard it merely as the natural effect of advancing years if Goethe and Schiller modified and cleared their views; if Kant, whose great emancipating act, the Critique of Pure Reason, falls chronologically in the same period (1781), corrected what seemed to him too absolute in his system, and reconstructed from the basis of the conscience that metaphysical world which he had destroyed by his analysis of the intellect. The world just then was undergoing profound changes. The great "Philosopher-king" had descended to the tomb (1786), and with him the absolute liberty of thought which had reigned for forty-six years. The French Revolution, after having exalted all generous souls, and seemingly confirmed the triumph of liberty and justice which the generation had witnessed in America, took a direction and drifted into excesses which undeceived, sobered, and saddened even the most hopeful believers. As regards personal circumstances, the Italian journey of Goethe (1786-1788) and his scientific investigations into nature, the study of Kant's new philosophy to which Schiller submitted his undisciplined mind (1790 and 1791), were the high-schools out of which their genius came strengthened and purified, although their æsthetic and moral doctrines did not remain quite unimpaired by them. I shall endeavor to give an idea of this double process and its results at the risk of being still more abstract and dry than before.