Kant: A Biographytissue of daring metaphors, poetic images and mythological allusions does
not serve to conceal the corpus of thought as under a farthingale instead
of letting it glimmer forth agreeably as under a translucent veil."^91 Of
course, Kant thought they did; and he gave a number of examples to show
this. He thought that the work would have benefited from a greater criti¬
cal reserve in the marshaling of presumed evidence. He also disliked
Herder's rejection of the concept of race and "especially... the classifi¬
cation based on hereditary coloration."^92 Excusing himself as unqualified
to judge what Herder had to say about the education of the human race on
the basis of ancient texts - not being a philologist and not being at home
"outside" of nature - he went on to defend some propositions that
Herder chose to attack. The first of these is the claim that "man is an an¬
imal that needs a master." Herder had called this an "easy" and "vicious"
principle in the book. It was, of course, a principle Kant had espoused in
his own "Ideas." After defending it as a principle that was not vicious but
salutary, he ironically added that it might nonetheless have been put for¬
ward by a vicious man.^93
Herder did not like this installment of the review much better than the
first.^94 He prayed: "God deliver us from this evil." But Kant was not yet
finished with Herder. In November 1785, he published in the Berlinische
Monatsschrift an essay on "The Definition of the Concept of the Human
Race," which was, at least in part, an answer to Herder.^95 In it, he tried to
show that race must be based on inherited traces, such as skin color, and
he claimed that therefore there are just four races - namely, the white,
yellow, black, and red. Furthermore, he argued that there are no charac¬
teristics other than color that are inevitably inherited. This also meant for
him that children of mixed marriages necessarily inherit characteristics of
both races, and that they inevitably pass these characteristics on to their
children. He rejected the idea that the different races originated from
different kinds {Stämme) of people. Rather, he thought that there had been
one original kind of humanity, which possessed the four different possi¬
bilities within itself, and that the differentiation into races had proceeded
in accordance with adaptations made necessary in different regions of the
world. There are no different species of humanity, only different races.
"The whites cannot be differentiated as a separate species of human be¬
ing from the blacks; and there are no different species of human beings at all;
such an assumption would deny the unity of the kind from which they all
must have originated."^96
Herder had argued that the concept of race did not make any sense. The