  Rickert’s theory of generalizing and individualizing concept formation as the systematically fundamental criterion for the demarcation of science elicited other waves of criticism. Husserl, for example, considered it an oversimplification of the Kantian problem of the transcendental deduction in that Rickert simply takes for granted that the infinite, unsurveyable manifold of immediate experience is amenable to conceptualization (Husserl 2001, 91). However, given his premises it is hard to see why a completely chaotic and heterogeneous immediate experience would nonetheless lend itself to conceptual rationalization. The problem, according to Husserl, is that for Rickert “world-experience (Welterfahrung) remains an empty word” (Husserl 2001, 100). Moreover, and similarly to Dilthey, Husserl laments the fact that Rickert downplays historically active subjectivity as the source of culture. Like Rickert, Husserl distinguishes between nature and culture in terms of “the world considered without significance” as opposed to “the world full of significance” (Husserl 2002, 139), however, he immediately relates back such significance to the operations of “meaning-bestowing subjectivity, which endows things with spiritual meaning [vergeistigen] through operations of significance [Bedeutungsleistungen]” (Husserl 2002, 140). For this reason, Husserl considers the whole dispute about whether the correct pair of concepts to demarcate the ambits of science should be nature/Geist (Dilthey) or nature/culture (Rickert) “a mere verbal dispute” (Husserl 2002, 140). Another line of criticism of Rickert’s distinction comes from his student, Emil Lask. In his personal notes Lask forcefully asserts that “a purely logical meaning of nature must be absolutely denied” (Lask 1924, 272). Lask argues that in Rickert’s reconstruction natural-scientific generalization and historical individualization are treated as equally legitimate and complementary ways of conceptualizing empirical reality. Against this view Lask contends that the generalizations carried out by the natural sciences presuppose a preliminary ‘devitalization’ (Ertötung) and ‘quantification’ of reality, in which the dimension of significance and value is put out of play (Lask 1924, 244). In a way that anticipates Husserl’s later treatment of this issue in The Crisis of the European Sciences (Husserl 1970). Lask points out that our original experience of the world is pervaded with value and significance and it is only by way of an abstractive impoverishment of this original experience that the natural sciences create their value-free (and to that extent artificial) field of research. As a matter of fact, however, there is evidence that Rickert was well aware of the quantifying tendency of natural science (see for instance Rickert 1900, 76), although he did not assign to it a central role.