 Herder took over this position from his teacher, the pre-critical Kant, who had similarly espoused a form of sentimentalism in Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766). Via Kant it can ultimately be traced back to the British sentimentalist tradition, especially Hume, whose main argument for it Herder seems to echo at points in This Too a Philosophy of History: moral judgment of its very nature motivates; but reason does not motivate, only sentiments do that; therefore moral judgment must fundamentally consist of sentiments.