 Hegel had conceived nature (Natur) and spirit (Geist) as two different expressions of a single divine infinite Reason, which manifests itself temporally from two different points of view. His project of an encyclopedia of philosophical sciences had three parts, the logic, the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of spirit, where the logic had the task of depicting the dialectical conceptual structure of infinite divine Reason itself. But this Hegelian project for securing the ultimate logico-metaphysical identity of nature and spirit found ever fewer followers as the century progressed, as the rising tide of neo-Kantianism – aided by further developments within the natural sciences instigated by Hermann von Helmholtz – undermined the appeal of the original Naturphilosophie of Schelling and Hegel together with their Absolute Reason. The result was the problem of the Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften as it presented itself to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [Cassirer 1942] develops a characteristically methodological perspective on this problem by treating both disciplines as empirical rather than “speculative” sciences (in the sense of Schelling and Hegel) and elucidating their methodological relationship within the philosophy of symbolic forms.