[398] of literature, who 'also' endeavours to distinguish between the natural and the humane sciences, thereby assigning [zuweist] a distinctive role to the history of the latter group and likewise to 'psychology', then allowing the whole to merge together in a relativistic 'philosophy of life'. Considered superficially, this sketch is 'correct'. But the 'substance' eludes it, and it covers up more than it reveals.
We may divide Dilthey's researches schematically into three domains: studies on the theory of the humane sciences, and the distinction between these and the natural sciences; researches into the history of the sciences of man, society, and the state; endeavours towards a psychology in which the 'whole fact of man' is to be presented. Investigations in the theory of science, in historical science, and in psychological hermeneutics are constantly permeating and intersecting each other. Where any one point of view predominates, the others are the motives and the means. What looks like disunity and an unsure, 'haphazard' way of 'trying things out', is an elemental restlessness, the one goal of which is to understand 'life' philosophically and to secure for this understanding a hermeneutical foundation in terms of 'life itself'. Everything centres in psychology, in which 'life' is to be understood in the historical context of its development and its effects, and understood as the way in which man, as the possible object of the humane sciences, and especially as the root of these sciences, is. Hermeneutics is the way this understanding enlightens itself; it is also the methodology of historiology, though only in a derivative form.
In the contemporaneous discussions, Dilthey's own researches for laying the basis for the humane sciences were forced one-sidedly into the field of the theory of science; and it was of course with a regard for such discussions that his publications were often oriented in this direction. But the 'logic of the humane sciences' was by no means central for him—no more than he was striving in his 'psychology' 'merely' to make improvements in the positive science of the psychical.
Dilthey's friend, Count Yorck, gives unambiguous expression to Dilthey's ownmost philosophical tendency in the communications between them, when he alludes to 'our common interest in understanding historicality' (italicized by the author).xiii Dilthey's researches are only now becoming accessible in their full scope; if we are to make them our own, we need the steadiness and concreteness of coming to terms with them in principle. [399] This not the place [Ort] for discussing in detail the problems which moved him, or how he was moved by them.xiv We shall, however, describe in a provisional way some of Count Yorck's central ideas, by selecting characteristic passages from the letters.
In these communications, Yorck's own tendency is brought to life by