The German Genius

words, the replacement of theology by biology (a word not introduced until 1802). As we shall see—and if an ugly neologism be allowed—the “biologification” of the world took place preeminently in Germany.
    The individual mainly responsible for this approach, at first, was the Englishman John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding , published in 1690. In this book, prepared in draft in 1671, Locke himself used the word “mind,” not “soul,” and referred to experience and observation, rather than some “innate” or religious (revelatory) origin, as the source of ideas. Locke further argued that motivation was based on experience—nature—which helped form the mind, rather than derived from some transcendent force operating on the soul. One unsettling effect of this was to further remove God from morality. Morality has to be taught, said Locke; it is not innate. Arguably most important of all, he said that the sense of self, the “I,” was not some mystical entity relating to the soul, but an “assemblage of sensations and passions that constitutes experience.” This was a key ingredient in the birth of psychology, even if that term was not much used yet.
    Alongside the rise of psychology, in Locke’s hands, and the (gradual) replacement of the concept of the soul with that of the mind, went a closer study of the brain. Thomas Willis had carried out numerous dissections of brains, helping to show that the ventricles (the central spaces where the cortex was folded in on itself) had no blood supply and was therefore unlikely to be the location of the soul, as some believed. Madness was increasingly being explained as a Gemütskrankheit , “failure of the mind,” understood as housed in a bodily organ, the brain. Yet more biologification.
    These changing beliefs were embodied, perhaps inevitably, in a work that took them to extremes. L’homme machine ( Man a Machine ) by the French surgeon Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, published in 1747, argued that thought is a property of matter “on a par with electricity,” coming down on the side of determinism, materialism, and atheism, all of which were to land the author in hot water. His nonetheless influential view was that human nature and animal nature were part of the same continuum, that human nature equated with physical nature; and he insisted that there were no “immaterial substances,” thus casting further doubt on the existence of the soul. Matter, he said, was animated by natural forces and had its own organizational powers. This, he said, left no room for God.
    La Mettrie’s book was as controversial as it was extreme, and it provoked a mighty backlash. That backlash was led from Germany.
    T HE R ISE OF H ISTORICISM
     
    In Germany there were two important areas of particular interest that would have a long-term effect on the country’s intellectual life. These areas were history and biology, though aesthetics and the concept of genius also formed part of the picture.
    Just as Richard Gawthrop has recently recovered a number of Pietistic writers and writings from obscurity and given them a new prominence, Peter Hanns Reill has done the same with seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century German historians. In doing this, he makes clear that the Aufklärung —to distinguish it from the French, English, and Scottish Enlightenments—had a number of achievements to its credit by the time of Bach’s death, and certainly by the time of Friedrich the Great’s.
    The Aufklärung, he points out, came later than the “Western” Enlightenment (i.e., in France, England, and Scotland), “and so it could and did borrow from its neighbours.” Though they borrowed from Voltaire and Hume, the Aufklärer (as Reill calls them), did so selectively, to address problems of specific concern in German intellectual life. Mostly, these stemmed from the impact of Leibnizian philosophy. 2 According to Leibniz, both the physical and spiritual realms were characterized by change . This is an unexceptional thing to say in the twenty-first century, but it was very different then: the Christian worldview implied not exactly a static state of affairs, as the Greeks had viewed their environment, but a world in limbo—Christians, even Pietists, were waiting for perfection in the next world. Moreover, and this is a point we shall return to time and again, the change envisioned by Leibniz was teleological: it was understood as development toward a specific