Max Mueller: Appropriation of the Vedic Past Christian teaching, it was a forgery which was discovered to be such several decades later.3 Herder's Audi cine Philosophic der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit ("Yet Another Philosophy of the History of the Formation of Humanity') was published in 1774. Expressive, dynamic, provocative, the work has been widely regarded as the manifesto of historicism. Though rooted in the eighteenth century, it is at the same time a critique of the progressionist historical consciousness of the Enlightenment, which regarded the contemporary technical and civilizatory achievements as 44 unquestionably superior to any in the past, making these in fact a yardstick for measuring the past, which then seemed steeped in superstition and prey to cynical priestly betrayal. But as Gadamer (1972, p. 103) has pointed out. Herder did not totally reject the ideas of the Enlightenment. Much more, he qualified these; each age was to be regarded in the light of what it was capable of accomplishing. Herder was as yet far removed from an uncritical, romantic glorification of the past. Though he polemicized against Voltaire's scepticism of all human endeavour and his refusal to* see any hope for the future of mankind, he followed him in identifying the Orient as the cradle of the human race. There was yet another shift in emphasis, for unlike Voltaire, he left the Christian claim to infallibility untouched. He had some qualms, however, about the location of the origin of the Christian faith: 'amongst the naked hills of Judea! Shortly before the overthrow of the whole of this ignominous people, even in the last miserable epoch of these very same people, in a manner which will always remain miraculous....' (1982, pp. 75-76)—since the Jewish people had no place in his historical universe. The Orient then as the childhood of man. Herder's use of the metaphor of the ages of man for both universal history as well as for individual peoples and states was an effort to organize historically, without any claim to absolute consistency, for in his scheme the successive ages did not transcend the preceding, nor were the later ages seen as inevitably deteriorating (Meyer, 1981). The significance of the Orient in Herder's thought is part of the debate with the classicism of J.J. Winckelmann (1717-1768), the well-known scholar of Greek art. Herder had accused Winckelmann of having paid too little attention to the Asiatic and the Egyptian in his Gedanken iiber die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke (1755, 'Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works'). Winckelmann had attempted to delineate the immense significance of Greek works of art, particularly sculpture, for contemporary artistic production. If the artist allows his senses and hands to be led by the Greek regulations of beauty, then he is on the way which will lead him most securely to the imitation of nature. The concept of the Whole, of the Perfect in the nature of the Ancients will purify and make more sensuous the concepts of the Divided in our nature....' (Szondi, 1974, p. 34) Herder's attempt to relocate the place of the Greeks in the historical sequence of the cultural history of mankind was then an attempt to free himself from the classicism of Winckelmann and his claim that the imitation of nature was possible only by way of imitation of Greek art. Even though Herder's eloquent rhetoric tempts in the direction, it would be an error to regard his evaluation of the Orient Journal of Arts 6' Ideas