 The Marburg view of that history differs in two important respects from Hegel’s, with which it might otherwise seem to have much in common: first, it is not based upon a sequence of conceptual contradiction and resolution; second, the history of science’s development is relativistic, that is, in principle incapable of achieving an “absolute” resolution (Natorp 1912c: 211, ff.). Let me focus on the first of these differences. For Hegel, history is the linear evolution of Geist’s self-knowledge through time; the further to the right you go, the more advanced the stage of (self-)consciousness. These stages—the “phenomena”—of Geist are inseparable from, indeed just are their cultural manifestations. Cohen and Natorp, too, take genuine history to be the history of rational self-consciousness, but for them this simply means reason’s transcendental, reflective consciousness of the basis of science, that is, method. This principle of lawfulness is in itself unchanging, eternal, atemporal; it is not expressed “in” phenomena, but instead makes possible and generates phenomena as such; and indeed (as we saw above) generates time itself as a condition of the possibilty of phenomena. Because its object—this rational insight into reason’s own principle—is essentially detached from time, history for the Marburg School is not conceived with respect to time. Of course science develops in time, and may be tracked diachronically along a time-line, yet its innermost core is the self-same atemporal idea, around which science circles, its progression represented by ever wider, but concentric  orbits.[35]  Thus the history of science is itself ideal, in the sense of focusing solely upon those moments of reflective illumination when science becomes self-conscious—through philosophy—of its rational foundation or transcendental nucleus. Cohen writes: “In the history of every science the history of scientific reason in general always fulfills itself concentrically” (Cohen 1916: 310). He considers the fact that each of these moments of self-consciousness must occur in concrete circumstances and have a unique point on a real time-line to be as obvious as it is  irrelevant.[36] 