In harmony with Giordano Bruno he thinks existence consists of a coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum), which are compatible with life, but in reflective thought remain forever incompatible. This explains the futility of analysis. In direct antithesis to Kant he holds (in the posthumous treatise Metakritik über den Purismus der reinen Vernunft) that reason, apart from tradition, faith and experience, is utterly helpless. He directs his attack more particularly against Kant's distinction between matter and form, intuition and reflection. What nature has joined together man must not put asunder!
John Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) likewise emphasizes the helplessness of reason: It is a product, not an original principle. He makes the racial character of poetry and religion prominent, regarding them as the immediate products of the human mind, in contrast to clear conception and volitional conduct. He extols the ages in which the mental faculties operated in unison rather than in isolation from each other, in which poetry, philosophy and religion were one. He aimed to penetrate behind the division of labor in the realm of mind. During the sixties he was an enthusiastic student of Kant, whom he attacks rather indirectly in the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-1791), which is his most important work, more directly in his later, less significant treatises (Metakritik, 1799, Kalligone, 1800). As opposed to Kant, he denies the opposition between the individual and society. The individual is identified with the entire race by innumerable unconscious influences, and his inmost being is modified by historical development. On the other hand the goal of history is not alone determined by the race as a whole but likewise by the individual. Herder was no less opposed to the distinction between mind and nature,
