 Herder also implies an additional important point concerning the general nature of interpretation: After him, the question would be explicitly raised whether interpretation is a science or an art. Herder does not himself explicitly raise or address this question. But his strong inclination would clearly be to say that interpretation is like rather than unlike natural science; see, e.g., already On Thomas Abbt’s Writings. He has several reasons for thinking so: (1) He assumes (as indeed did virtually everyone at this period) that the meaning of an author’s text is as much an objective matter as the subjects investigated by the natural scientist. (2) The difficulty of interpretation that results from radical mental difference, and the consequent need for a methodologically sophisticated and painstaking approach to interpretation in many cases, make for further points of similarity between interpretation and natural science. (3) The essential role of “divination”, qua hypothesis, in interpretation constitutes yet a further point of similarity between interpretation and natural science. Moreover, (4) even the subject-matter of interpretation is not, in Herder’s view, sharply different from that dealt with by natural science: the latter investigates observable physical processes in nature in order to determine the forces that underlie and produce them, but, similarly, interpretation investigates observable human verbal (and non-verbal) physical behavior in order to determine the forces that underlie and produce it (Herder explicitly identifying mental conditions, such as conceptual understanding, as “forces”).