 Dilthey conceives of most of the human sciences as analyzing human interactions at a level that can mediate between individual initiative and communal tradition. These sciences deal with what he calls “cultural systems” and “external organizations of society”. Cultural systems are associations that individuals join voluntarily for certain purposes that they can only achieve through cooperation. These systems are cultural in the widest possible sense and include all aspects of our social life. They can be political, economic, artistic, scientific or religious in nature and are not normally bound by national or other overarching interests. External organizations of society by contrast are those more controlling institutional structures like a family and a state that we are born into. Here “enduring causes bind the wills of many into a single whole” (1883/SW.I, 94) within which relations of power, dependence and property can be established. It is important to cross-reference cultural systems and institutional organizations. Enlightenment thinkers had focused on cultural systems such as scientific academies and their potential universal scope while overlooking how most educational institutions are controlled by local authorities. Although Dilthey received his training from members of the Historical School, he recognized that many of them had been equally one-sided by stressing the distinctive institutional organizations that separate different peoples while ignoring the role of generalizations made possible through the analysis of cultural systems.