 In the preface to the Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey refers to his project as a Critique of Historical Reason. We can now see that this is first of all a critique of the metaphysical thesis that there can be an overarching “universal explanatory framework for all historical facts” (1883/SW.I, 141). If universal explanations are to be possible for history as well as for nature, then we must recognize that they are only possible for correlating partial contents of reality. The reason that the natural sciences have been so successful in discovering causal laws of nature is that they abstract from the full scope of the external world. 