 He in particular rejects a certain rationale for it that Dryden and others had advocated, namely, that a translation should provide the work that the author would have written had his native language not been the one he actually had but instead the target language. Herder objects to this that due to the essential dependence of thought on language and the deep differences in the latter, in cases such as that of translating Homer, for example, the author could not have written his work in the modern target language.