 Windelband shares the goal of securing the autonomy of the historical disciplines with his contemporary Wilhelm Dilthey. In his 1883 Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften [Introduction to the human sciences] Dilthey had founded the distinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences or “sciences of spirit” on a distinction between outer and inner experience. While outer experience forms the basis of hypothetical knowledge in natural science, inner experience discloses “from within” how the individual is an intersection of social and cultural relations (Dilthey 1883: 30–32, 60–61, 88–89). Inner experience is at the same time psychological and socio-historical, and a descriptive psychology capable of grasping the integrated nexus of inner experience can provide the “sciences of spirit” with a solid foundation (Dilthey 1894).