 Herder’s genetic method is first and foremost a means toward better understanding, or explaining, psychological outlooks and psychologically laden practices—especially a means toward better understanding one’s own, toward better self-understanding. The method achieves its distinctive contribution to better understanding such outlooks and practices, saliently including one’s own, by showing, in a naturalistic (i.e., non-religious, non-mythical, non-transcendent) way, that and how they have developed historically out of earlier origins prior to which they were not yet really present at all and from which they have emerged via a series of transformations.