 Another major contribution that Herder makes in the area of meta-ethics is his application of a novel “genetic” method of explanation to the domain of morality. This method depends on Herder’s historicism. It purports to make a psychological phenomenon more intelligible by tracing it back to its historical origins and showing how these developed into it via a series of intermediate forms. Herder first developed this method in the mid-1760s in application to literary genres and language (in Attempt at a History of Lyric Poetry and the Fragments respectively), but he then went on to apply it to moral (and other) values in This Too a Philosophy of History (1774). Since moralities change over time, it is possible to contribute to explaining or better understanding the morality of a late age, for example, eighteenth-century Europe, by identifying the earliest morality in its historical tradition and then showing how this developed through a chain of subsequent moralities into the late morality in question. Accordingly, This Too a Philosophy of History attempts to show (roughly) that after the authoritarian morality of the ancient Hebrews had laid the foundations, the Egyptians’ morality of diligence and citizen’s faithfulness arose; this then gave way to the Phoenicians’ morality of freedom and openness; the Greeks next synthesized the preceding moralities into a morality of citizen’s faithfulness and freedom; Rome then modified this inheritance into moral values of courage, prudence, and patriotism; following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the northern tribes, together with Christianity, developed a richer set of values that included courage, faith, honesty, reverence for gods, humanity, chastity, and knightly honor; and then finally the (professed) morality of modern Europe emerged as a result of this whole tradition. This Herderian approach to explaining, or contributing to a better understanding of, morality would subsequently be taken over and developed further by Hegel (in the early theological writings and the Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]), Nietzsche (especially in On the Genealogy of Morality [1887]), and Foucault.