 Windelband’s chief target is the positivist philosophy of history, defended by Comte, Mill, and others. On this view, the method of history ought to be fundamentally the same as that of the natural sciences, and its goal ought to be the discovery of general laws that explain and predict historical  events.[26]  A secondary target of this essay is the view that history and the natural sciences can be distinguished principally in terms of their subject matter. This view is expressed by the terms “Naturwissenschaften” (sciences of nature) and “Geisteswissenschaften” (sciences of “mind” or “spirit”), which Dilthey introduced in his 1883 book Introduction to the Geisteswissenschaften. Windelband objects that when the distinction among the sciences is drawn in this way, psychology ends up as a Geisteswissenschaft like history; indeed psychology, as the empirical science of the mind, ought to be the fundamental Geisteswissenschaft on which all other Geisteswissenschaften depend. But, Windelband argues, psychology is methodologically just as much a “nomothetic” science as physics is: both try to discover mathematical laws of their phenomena through controlled  experimentation.[27]  And the amount of psychology that a historian needs does not go beyond what is supplied by reflective common sense; the new discoveries of empirical psychologists have been, and are likely to be, of no special significance for  historians.[28]