 This leaves two other types of motivation that might be appealed to for doing the sort of historiography in question: (2) because examining the course of such deeds and events reveals some sort of overall meaning in history, or (3) because it leads to efficient causal insights that enable us to explain the past and perhaps also predict or control the future. Herder is again skeptical about these rationales, however. This skepticism is perhaps clearest in the Older Critical Forestlet (1767–8) where, in criticism of rationale (2), he consigns the task of “the whole ordering together of many occurrences into a plan” not to the historian but instead to the “creator, … painter, and artist”, and in criticism of rationale (3), he goes as far as to assert (on the basis of a Hume- and Kant-influenced general skepticism about causal knowledge) that with the search for efficient causes in history “historical seeing stops and prophecy begins”. His later writings depart from this early position in some obvious ways, but they also in important ways remain faithful to it. (For further details, see Section 3 of the  Supplementary Discussion.)