 Herder proposes (prominently in This Too a Philosophy of History, for instance) that the way to bridge radical mental difference when interpreting is through Einfühlung, “feeling one’s way in”. This proposal has often been thought (for example, by Friedrich Meinecke) to mean that the interpreter should perform some sort of psychological self-projection onto texts. However, that is not Herder’s main idea here—for making it so would amount to advocating just the sort of distorting assimilation of the thought in a text to one’s own that he is above all concerned to avoid. As can be seen from This Too a Philosophy of History, what he mainly has in mind is instead a rather arduous process of historical-philological inquiry. What, though, more specifically, is the cash value of his metaphor of Einfühlung? It has at least five components, which are quite various in nature but consistent with each other and all quite sensible and deep: (1) First of all, the metaphor implies (once again) that the interpreter typically faces a radical difference, a gulf, between his own mentality and that of the interpreted subject, making interpretation a difficult, laborious task (it implies that there is an “in” there that the interpreter must carefully and laboriously “feel his way into”). (2) The metaphor also implies more specifically (This Too a Philosophy of History shows) that the “feeling one’s way in” should include thorough research not only into a text’s use of language but also into its whole geographical, historical, and social context. (3) It also implies a claim—based on Herder’s quasi-empiricist theory of concepts—that in order to understand an interpreted subject’s language the interpreter must achieve an imaginative reproduction of his (perceptual and affective) sensations. (4) It also implies (This Too a Philosophy of History again shows) that hostility in an interpreter toward the people whom he interprets will generally distort his interpretation, and should therefore be avoided. (Herder, though, is equally opposed to excessive identification with them for the same reason.) (5) Finally, it also implies that the interpreter should strive to develop his grasp of linguistic usage, contextual facts, and relevant sensations to the point where this achieves something like the same immediacy and automaticness that it had for a text’s original author and audience when they understood the text in light of such factors (so that it acquires for him, as it had for them, the phenomenology more of a feeling than a cognition).