THE HISTORICAL AND THE NORMATIVE SCIENCES 113 



logy has substituted elementary sensations for the real contents of 

 consciousness and has constructed relations between these element- 

 ary mental states on the basis of processes in the organism, especially 

 brain processes. Here, again, reality is left behind and a mere concep- 

 tional construction is put in its place. But this construction fulfills 

 its purpose and thus gives us truth; and if the basis is once given, the. 

 psychological sciences can build up a causal system of the conscious 

 processes in the individual man and in society. 



4. The Historical and the Normative Sciences 



The two divisions of the physical and mental sciences represent our 

 systematized submission to objects. But we saw from the first that it 

 is an artificial abstraction to consider in our real experience the object 

 alone. We saw clearly that we, as acting personalities, in our will and 

 in our attitudes, do not feel ourselves in relation to objects, merely, but 

 to will-acts; and that these will-acts were the individual ones of other 

 subjects or the over-individual ones which come to us in our conscious- 

 ness of norms. The sciences which deal with our submissions to the 

 individual will-acts of others are the Historical Sciences. Their start- 

 ing-point is the same as that of the object sciences, the immediate 

 experience. But the other subjects reach our individuality from the 

 start in a different way from the objects. The wills of other subjects 

 come to us as propositions with which we have to agree or disagree ; 

 as suggestions, which we are to imitate or to resist; and they carry in 

 themselves that reference to an opposite which, as we saw, character- 

 izes all will-activity. The rock or the tree in our surroundings may 

 stimulate our reactions, but does not claim to be in itself a decision 

 with an alternative. But the political or legal or artistic or social or 

 religious will of my neighbors not only demands my agreement or 

 disagreement, but presents itself to me in its own meaning as a free 

 decision which rejects the opposite, and its whole meaning is de- 

 stroyed if I consider it like the tree or the rock as a mere phenom- 

 enon, as an object in the world of objects. Whoever has clearly 

 understood that politics and religion and knowledge and art and law 

 come to me from the first quite differently from objects, can never 

 doubt that their systematic connection must be most sharply sepa- 

 rated from all the sciences which connect impressions of objects, and 

 is falsified if the historical disciplines are treated simply as parts of 

 the sciences of phenomena for instance, as parts of sociology, the 

 science of society as a psycho-physical object. 



Just as natural science transcends the immediately experienced 

 object and works out the whole system of our necessary submissions 

 to the world of objects, so the historical sciences transcend the social 

 will-acts which approach us in our immediate experience, and again 



