Buddhist Romanticism

history of the universe; and monism, the theory that the universe is all One.
He derived these three principles from three disparate sources. The vitalism
came from the organic views of science that were developing at the time
(Herder was a friend of the geologist, Johann Heinrich Merck, and cited
Albrecht von Haller’s researches into the role of magnetism and electricity
in biological tissues). The historicism came from the founder of art history,
Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768); and the monism, from Kant’s
nemesis, Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677).
On a general level, there is a logic connecting all three sources. Haller’s
vitalistic theories fit well with monism in that they claimed to erase any
clear line dividing mind and matter; Winckelmann’s aesthetic theory fit
well with vitalism through his theory that styles of art developed
historically in organic ways. However, when we look at the details, we find
that Herder had to make major adjustments in Spinoza’s philosophy for it
to fit with the other two sources. Spinoza, had he been alive, would have
been no more pleased than Kant was with the result.
Herder had been attracted to Spinoza’s monism for its vision of a
universe not only One, but also One within God. This justified Herder’s
interest in all things human, as they could be explained as expressions of
the divine acting in and through human nature. However, Spinoza’s
monism had entailed some less attractive conclusions. He taught that the
universe could have only one substance, which was God, and that
everything else was just an accident of that substance. The physical world
and mental world were simply two aspects of one underlying substance.
Each aspect, observed on its own terms, could be seen to obey its own laws,
but because the physical was not essentially different from the mental,
those laws were actually parallel.
Now, physical laws, in Spinoza’s account, were purely logical and
mechanical, predetermined by necessity from the reason innate in God’s
nature, and acting without apparent will or purpose. This meant that
everything happening in the mind was predetermined by necessity as well.
Spinoza even wrote his major philosophical work, the Ethica, along the lines
of Euclid’s Geometry, to show how the behavior of things, in both the world
of objects and the world of the mind, was derived necessarily from a single
first cause.
Because God was the only substance, only God had freedom, which
Spinoza defined as the power to follow one’s own nature. Human beings,
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