THE HISTORICAL AND THE NORMATIVE SCIENCES 115 



connection of the historian can therefore never be a necessary one, 

 however much we may observe empirical regularities. If there were 

 no identities, our reason could not find connection in history; but if the 

 historical connections were necessary, like the causal ones, it would 

 not be history. The historian is, therefore, unable and without the 

 ambition to look into the future like the naturalist; his domain is 

 the past. 



Yet will-attitudes and will-acts can also be brought into necessary 

 connection; that is, we can conceive will-acts as ideologically iden- 

 tical with each other and exempt from the freedom of the individual. 

 That is clearly possible only if they are conceived as beyond the free- 

 dom of individual decision and related to the over-individual subject. 

 The question is then no longer how this special man wills and decides, 

 but how far a certain will-decision binds every possible individual who 

 performs this act if he is to share our common world of will and mean- 

 ing. Such an over-individual connection of will-acts is what we call 

 the logical connection. It shares with all other connections the depend- 

 ence upon the category of identity. The logical connection shows 

 how far one act or combination of acts involves, and thus is partially 

 identical with, a new combination. This logical connection has, in 

 common with the causal connection, necessity; and in common with 

 the historical connection, teleological character. Any individual will- 

 act of historical life may be treated for certain purposes as such a 

 starting-point of over-individual relations; it would then lead to that 

 scientific treatment which gives us an interpretation, for instance, of 

 law. Such interpretative sciences belong to the system of history in 

 the widest sense of the word. 



The chief interest, however, must belong to the logical connections 

 of those will-acts which themselves have over-individual character. 

 A merely individual proposition can lead to necessary logical connec- 

 tion, but cannot claim that scientific importance which belongs to 

 the logical connection of those propositions which are necessary for 

 the constitution of every real experience: the science of chess cannot 

 stand on the same level with the science of geometry, the science of 

 local legal statutes not on the same level with the system of ethics. 

 The logical connections of the over-individual attitudes thus consti- 

 tute the fourth large division besides the physical, the mental, and the 

 historical sciences. It must thus comprise the systems of all those 

 propositions which are presuppositions of our common reality, in- 

 dependent of the free individual decision. Here belong the acts of 

 approval the ethical approval of changes and achievements, as 

 well as the aesthetic approval of the given world ; the acts of convic- 

 tion the religious convictions of a superstructure of the world as 

 well as the metaphysical convictions of a substructure; and above 

 all, the acts of affirmation and submission, the logical as well as the 



