  In the fourth Grove, Herder also has interesting things to say about arts we have not mentioned, namely, dance, architecture, and horticulture, and an important passage about music, which he analyzes as the “imitation of human passions,” arousing “a series of inner feelings, true, although not distinct, not intuitive, only extremely obscure” (“Fourth Grove,” pp. 406–7). But we will have to leave these arts aside and conclude our discussion of Herder with a comment on his supposed historical and cultural relativism, which, as was earlier noted, has often been thought to be his central contribution to modern thought.  Herder’s writings are certainly replete with observations connecting the different circumstances and mores of different cultures and times with differences in their arts and tastes. For example: “The Greek, the Gothic, the Moorish taste in architecture and sculpture, in mythology and in poetry, is it the same? And is [the difference] not to be explained from times, mores, and peoples?” (“Fourth Grove,” p. 286). And in his essay on Shakespeare, he attacks the rigid insistence on unity of time, place, and action in classical French theater by arguing that these ideals grew naturally out of the circumstances of both Greek theater and Greek life, but that it is absurd to make them into rigid rules in the very different circumstances of both modern theater and modern life (“Shakespeare,” pp. 162–3).