However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.
Wilhelm Dilthey

Thus there arose in me both a need and a plan for the foundation of the human sciences.
Wilhelm Dilthey

The individual always realizes only one of the possibilities in its development, which could always have taken a different turning whenever it has to make an important decision.
Wilhelm Dilthey

Thus, in accordance with the spirit of the Historical School, knowledge of the principles of the human world falls within that world itself, and the human sciences form an independent system.
Wilhelm Dilthey

The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.
Wilhelm Dilthey

We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.
Wilhelm Dilthey

If we conceive all the changes in the physical world as reducible to the motion of atoms, motions generated by means of the fixed nuclear forces of those atoms, the whole of the world could thus be known by means of the natural sciences.
Wilhelm Dilthey

A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization.
Wilhelm Dilthey