  Rickert is willing to grant the “paramount significance of mental beings within the historical material” (Rickert 1986, 123) and the importance of “historical personalities that valuate” (Rickert 1986, 122) for the cultural sciences. He is also open to the use of Geist, provided that this term is considered synonymous with culture. However, he insists that Dilthey’s emphasis on psychic life and reliving is both systematically and methodologically misleading. First, not all of psychic life is relevant in the cultural sciences. Most psychic manifestations, both those occurring in individuals and those objectified in cultural objects, are completely devoid of historical significance, in that they lack the reference to a general value. Second, even if we had the capacity to relive past experiences in their total intensity and vividness, this would not amount to understanding those experiences and their cultural objectifications. In the historical sciences, too, to know does not mean merely to mirror or depict a real object. Only if the notion of value and the objective value-relatedness of historical individuals (be they physical or psychic) are taken as the systematic point of departure can the subjectivity involved in history be adequately understood. “The fact that history is a science of mental entities does not determine its logical structure, for mental processes can also be represented in a natural scientific or generalizing fashion. Rather, the converse is true: On the basis of the logical structure of historical science […] it can be understood why history primarily takes a certain kind of mental life as the object of its investigation” (Rickert 1986, 127).