And it is in this connection that we have to note the reserves which Goethe makes in the acknowledgment of his debt to Herder, "Had Herder been more methodical in his mental habit," he says, "he would have afforded the most valuable guidance for the permanent direction of my culture; but he was more disposed to probe and to stimulate than to give guidance and leading." So it was, as Goethe adds elsewhere, that the result of Herder's influence on him was a mental confusion and tumult, plainly visible in another of his early writings,[80] where "quite simple thoughts and observations are veiled in a dust-cloud of unusual words and phrases." [Footnote 79: _Goetz von Berlichingen._] [Footnote 80: Von deutcher Baukunst.] The homage which Goethe pays to Herder in the retrospect of his Strassburg days is equally emphasised in his contemporary letters.
"Herder, Herder," he writes in one place, "remain to me what you are.
If I am destined to be your planet I will be it; be it willingly, faithfully."[81] Yet we may doubt whether Herder's influence was, in truth, so determining a factor in his life as Goethe himself represents it.

Herder, he tells us, first taught him a wise self-distrust, but we have seen that one of the lessons he professes to have learned from Oeser was "to be modest without self-depreciation, and to be proud without presumption." Before he saw Herder, also, he had already divined the greatness of Shakespeare and the futility of Voltaire's criticisms of him.

Herder's ideas regarding the human spirit and its possibilities were in the air, and, had the two men never met, the probability is that Goethe's development would not have been different from what it actually was.

Herder's general views were already incipient in him; and what Herder did was to deepen and intensify them.[82] Nevertheless the collision for the first time with a mind that revealed to him his own immaturity was for Goethe, as for every youth, a formative influence of the highest import and an epoch in his mental history.

Yet in his association with Herder one fact has to be noted: Goethe was not subjugated by him.