The racial theory of civilization has ceased to be scientifically respectable. Today we only know it as a sophistical excuse for national pride and national hatred. The idea that there is a European race whose peculiar virtue render it fit to dominate the rest of the world, or an English race whose innate qualities make imperialism a duty, or a Nordic race whose predominance in America is the necessary condition of American greatness, and whose purity in Germany is indispensable to the purity of German culture, we know is scientifically baseless and politically disastrous. We know that physical anthropology and cultural anthropology are different studies, and we find it difficult to see how any one have confused them. Consequently we are not inclined to be grateful to Herder for having started so pernicious a doctrine.
It would be possible to defend him by arguing that his theory of racial differences does not in itself give any ground for believing in the superiority of one race over another. One might argue that it only implies each type of man to have its own form of life, its own conception of happiness, and its own rhythm of historical development. On this showing, the social institutions and political forms of different peoples can differ without being intrinsically better or worse than one another, and the goodness of a certain political form is never an absolute goodness by only a goodness relative to the people that has created it.
But this would not be a legitimate interpretation of Herder’s thought. It is essential to his whole point of view that the differences between the social and political institutions of different races are derived not from the historical experience of each race but from its innate psychological peculiarities, and this is fatal to a true understanding of history. The differentiations between different cultures which can be explained on these lines are not historical differentiations, like that between, say, Renaissance and Medieval cultures, but non-historical differentiations like that between a community of bees and a community of ants. Human nature has been divided up, but it is still human nature, still nature and not mind; and in terms of practical politics this means that the task of creating or improving a culture is assimilated to that of creating or improving a breed of domestic animals. Once Herder’s theory of race is accepted, there is no escaping the Nazi marriage laws.
The problem which Herder bequeathed to his successors, therefore, was the problem of thinking out clearly the distinction between nature and man: nature as a process or sum of processes governed by laws which are blindly obeyed, man as a process or sum of processes governed (as Kant was to put it) not by law simply but by consciousness of law. It had to be shown that history is a process of this second type: that is to say, the life of man is an historical life because it is a mental and spiritual life.
Herder’s first volume was published in the spring of 1784 when he was forty. Kant’s pupil had evidently read the book as soon as it appeared. Although Kant dissented from many of its doctrines, as his somewhat acid review was to show a year later, it did stimulate him to think for himself about the problems it raised and to write an essay of his own which constitutes his chief work on the philosophy of history. Kant was already sixty when he read the first part of the Ideen, and his mind had been formed by the Enlightenment as it took root in Germany under the aegis of Frederick the Great and of Voltaire, whom Frederick brought to the Prussian court. Hence Kant represents, as compared with Herder, a certain astringent tendency towards anti-Romanticism. In the true style of the Enlightenment, he regards past history as a spectacle of human irrationality and looks forward to a Utopia of rational life. What is really remarkable in him is the way in which he combines the Enlightenment point of view with the Romanticist, very much as in his theory of knowledge he combines rationalism and empiricism.
1.The passage is mainly about （ ）.
2.The adjective “sophistical”(Line 2, Para. 1) most probably means （ ）.
3.It is obvious from this passage that （ ）.
4.According to the writer, how did Kant regard Herder’s work?
5.The adjective “innate”(Line 3, Para. 3) is close in meaning to（ ）.
