["Dieu et cerveau, rien que Dieu et cerveau!" Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) and the neurosciences of this time].

The impact of Johann Gottfried von Herder on the broad spectrum of the history of ideas can hardly be estimated by separate categories derived from individual disciplines. It transcends the spheres of philosophy, theology, historiography and even medical anthropology--also because Herder, unlike many of his contemporary philosophers and hommes de lettres, was particularly interested in the neurophysiological and -anatomical investigations of his time. Herder's universal interest in human learning is reflected in numerous personal contacts to contemporary academic scholars and natural scientists, such as the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater, whose physiognomic doctrine mapped out a comprehensive research programme on character analysis, or the Mainz anatomist Samuel Thomas von Soemmering. Herder tightly received the latter's assumption about the interplay between the human soul and the anatomy of the brain. In this article, it shall be demonstrated that Herder's neurophilosophy was primarily influenced by a "pandynamic assumption of nature" and that it designated the brain centrally as a "working tool of God"--right between the human faculties of rationality, feeling and bodily development. The attractiveness of this concept to both basic brain research and clinical neurology was a result of his anthropological approach which combined latest developments in the natural sciences with a central perspective on the human sciences.