 Windelband’s language assumes a Hegelian tone. Critical philosophy equipped with the concept of realization is able to grasp and express the “spiritual value content” of reality (1904a: 165). History is capable of revealing the universal value content in the contingent maze of human interests and desires, and in so doing captures “the progressive realization of rational values” (1907: 20–21). The human as a rational being is not determined psychologically or naturally, but humanity is a historical task: “only as a historical being, as the developing species, do we have a share in world-reason” (1910a: 283: see also 1905: 185). Windelband even suggests that history itself has a goal, namely the realization of a common humanity (1908: 257).