 According to Rickert’s definitive elaboration, value-judgment precedes values. He posits that the “in-dividual,” as opposed to mere “individual,” phenomenon can be isolated as a discrete subject of our historical inquiry when we ascribe certain subjective values to the singular coherence and indivisibility that are responsible for its uniqueness. In his theory of value-relation (Wertbeziehung), Rickert argues that relating historical objects to values can still retain objective validity when it is based on a series of explicitly formulated conceptual distinctions. They are to be made firmly between the investigator’s values and those of the historical actor under investigation, between personal or private values and general cultural values of the time, and between subjective value-judgment and objective value-relations. In so positing, however, Rickert is making two highly questionable assumptions. One is that there are certain values in every culture that are universally accepted within that culture as valid, and the other, that a historian free of bias must agree on what these values are. Just as natural science must assume “unconditionally and universally valid laws of nature,” so, too, cultural-historical science must assume that there are “unconditionally and universally valid values.” If so, an “in-dividual” historical event has to be reduced to an “individual” manifestation of the objective process of history, a conclusion that essentially implies that Rickert returned to the German Idealist faith in the meaningfulness of history and the objective validity of the diverse values to be found in history. An empirical study in historical science, in the end, cannot do without a metaphysics of history. Bridging irrational reality and rational concept in historical science, or overcoming hiatus irrationalis (à la Emil Lask) without recourse to a metaphysics of history still remained a problem as acutely as before. While accepting the broadly neo-Kantian conceptual template as Rickert elaborated it, Weber’s methodological writings would turn mostly on this issue.