 His paper “On the Task of the Historian”, besides dealing with the problems the historian has to confront in writing history, offers a theory of historical research that is augmented by observations on the nature of historical understanding. The piece occupies a special place in the development of the hermeneutics of the human sciences. The historian Droysen called Humboldt “the Bacon of the historical sciences” in his influential Historik (theory of historical studies) and some of his own concepts and distinctions echo Humboldt’s formulations (Droysen 1958: 324). Whereas Droysen speaks of the method of the historian as “understanding by investigation” (forschendes Verstehen), Humboldt sets off historical understanding from mere deductive rational procedures by calling it an assimilation of the investigative capability (forschende Kraft) and the object under investigation (GS Vol 4: 39). Furthermore, with his notion of a “preexisting basis of understanding” (“vorgängige Grundlage des Begreifens”) Humboldt clearly anticipated Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s respective notions of an ontological or historical pre-understanding as necessary condition of all formal understanding and interpretation in the human sciences (GS Vol 4: 48), even though Gadamer in his Truth and Method gravely misrepresents the hermeneutic dimensions of Humboldt’s thought omitting the fact that for Humboldt (and Schleiermacher) understanding was grounded in language and linguisticality and was perceived by them as the correlative of the act of speaking.