In consequence of these influences the final phase of the German "Illumination" is marked by the appearance of two or three works in which Progress is a predominating idea.
We see this reaction against Wolf and his static school in a little work published by Herder in 1774--"a philosophy of history for the cultivation of mankind." There is continuous development, he declares, and one people builds upon the work of another.

We must judge past ages, not by the present, but relatively to their own particular conditions.
What exists now was never possible before, for everything that man accomplishes is conditioned by time, climate, and circumstances.
Six years later Lessing's pamphlet on the Education of the Human Race appeared, couched in the form of aphoristic statements, and to a modern reader, one may venture to say, singularly wanting in argumentative force.

The thesis is that the drama of history is to be explained as the education of man by a progressive series of religions, a series not yet complete, for the future will produce another revelation to lift him to a higher plane than that to which Christ has drawn him up.

This interpretation of history proclaimed Progress, but assumed an ideal and applied a measure very different from those of the French philosophers.
The goal is not social happiness, but a full comprehension of God.
Philosophy of religion is made the key to the philosophy of history.

The work does not amount to more than a suggestion for a new synthesis, but it was opportune and arresting.
Herder meanwhile had been thinking, and in 1784 he gave the German world his survey of man's career--Ideas of the Philosophy of the History of Humanity.