  At issue here, again, as in “The Conservation of Races” and “Sociology Hesitant,” is the relation between the human sciences and the natural sciences.  For the Du Bois of Black Reconstruction, historians who model their inquiry exclusively on the natural sciences (historians like the Beards) seek to identify the causal uniformities (“cosmic” laws) governing human events, which events they conceptualize by analogy to the behavior of the winds, waters and other forces of nature. The problem here, Du Bois believes, is not with the effort to identify the causal uniformities governing human events. Rather it is with the tendency in that effort to neglect the human meaning of human events, and thus to treat those events as inhuman, natural forces that lend themselves to a purely “mechanistic” explanation—by which Du Bois means explanation in terms that make no reference to the meanings that the human subjects who participate in those events attach to them.