 As in the philosophy of mind, Herder’s position in meta-ethics is naturalistic in spirit. Such a position was by no means uncontroversial in his day, as can be seen, for example, from his correspondence with Mendelssohn in 1769 concerning Spalding’s and Mendelssohn’s religious, afterlife-focused conception of humankind’s “vocation [Bestimmung]”, which Herder sharply opposed in favor of a this-worldly conception of the same.