 A further noteworthy component of Herder’s first-order morality is his moral ideal of Bildung, in the sense of an autonomous, individualistic development of all one’s capacities into a harmonious whole. He already worked out this ideal in writings from 1769 such as his Journal. Later, in On the Cognition and Sensation, he developed some deeper philosophical foundations for it: an account of human autonomy or freedom as something quite compatible with the laws of nature (an account closely related to one that he had already worked out in the Treatise on the Origin according to which a distinctive characteristic of humankind lies in a certain sort of flexibility, or freedom from determination by narrow instincts); a quasi-Leibnizian account of individuality as a general feature of all nature, including human nature as a special case; and an account of the deep interdependence of human beings’ psychological faculties, which undergirds the “harmonious whole” component of the ideal. This ideal would later go on to have an enormous influence on successors such as Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt (who saw its realization as the highest purpose of the state or even the whole universe), and Hegel.