  Unlike Weber, Du Bois is a moral realist who believes that historical inquiry can afford us knowledge of moral facts—knowledge, that is, of the proper distribution of moral responsibility and of the extent to which actions are right or wrong. But to obtain that knowledge, historians must understand human action in terms of subjective meanings, for they require some such understanding of human action to render intelligible their application of the vocabulary of moral evaluation—for Du Bois, a vocabulary that includes the language of “guilt,” of “moral courage and sacrifice,” and of “the degraded black millions.” Du Bois argues that a necessary condition of the possibility of acquiring knowledge of moral facts through the historian’s practice of the science of human action is a Verstehen-centered approach to that practice—or, more exactly, an approach that explains human actions in terms of subjects’ motives. Du Bois sketches a similar line of argument, five years later, in Dusk of Dawn (1940, 70).