to know about it. To avoid giving the secret away it should be suggested to these members that they found a monthly journal as their main project. And so on. On receiving note of these plans, Herder was, of course, despondent: “It is not going to amount to anything,” he writes in a letter from February 1788, and he adds: “I would rather wish that it didn’t amount to anything than that they destroy everything”.18
In the end, they didn’t get the possibility to either create or destroy anything at all.
Only a year later the French Revolution broke out, and all of a sudden the ambitions of bringing about a reform of the German principalities through Humanität und Bildung, cultivated and communicated by a society of the best men in each state, seemed almost naive and childish And who were to blame for it? Lo and behold, the Freemasons!
