 Herder also anticipated and influenced the Romantics in another important way. One of their most striking and distinctive positions was a certain valorization of literature and art over other areas of culture (such as science, religion, and morality). But Herder had already developed such a position before them. First, from an early period he argued that song was the origin of all language – and consequently also of all thought. Second, in works such as the Treatise on the Origin and especially the essay On Image, Poetry, and Fable (1787) he argued that all language (and consequently also all thought) is fundamentally figurative or metaphorical in nature—for example, that its grammar typically projects the two genders onto the whole of nature, and that it pervasively involves a set of creative transitions from an object to a sensory stimulus to an individualistically formed image and thence to thought and language—and is thus poetic. Third, he argued in works such as Attempt at a History of Lyric Poetry (1764) and On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry that poetry has been fundamental to religion from the beginning, and elsewhere that non-linguistic art, especially sculpture, has played an important role in religion from an early period as well. Fourth, he also argued that poetry has a very important function in moral education, indeed one even more important than that of other mechanisms of moral education such as laws.