and explain the psychical phenomena through reference to the physical world. It is in this way that modern psychology has substituted elementary sensations for the real contents of consciousness and has constructed relations between these elementary mental states on the basis of processes in the organism, especially brain processes. Here, again, reality is left behind and a mere conceptional construction is put in its place. But this construction fulfills its purpose and thus gives us truth; and if the basis is once given, the psychological sciences can build up a causal system of the conscious processes in the individual man and in society. 4. _The Historical and the Normative Sciences_ The two divisions of the physical and mental sciences represent our systematized submission to objects. But we saw from the first that it is an artificial abstraction to consider in our real experience the object alone. We saw clearly that we, as acting personalities, in our will and in our attitudes, do not feel ourselves in relation to objects, merely, but to will-acts; and that these will-acts were the individual ones of other subjects or the over-individual ones which come to us in our consciousness of norms. The sciences which deal with our submissions to the individual will-acts of others are the Historical Sciences. Their starting-point is the same as that of the object sciences, the immediate experience. But the other subjects reach our individuality from the start in a different way from the objects. The wills of other subjects come to us as propositions with which we have to agree or disagree; as suggestions, which we are to imitate or to resist; and they carry in themselves that reference to an opposite which, as we saw, characterizes all will-activity. The rock or the tree in our surroundings may stimulate our reactions, but does not claim to be in itself a decision with an alternative. But the political or legal or artistic or social or religious will of my neighbors not only demands my agreement or disagreement, but presents itself to me in its own meaning as a free decision which rejects the opposite, and its whole meaning is destroyed if I consider it like the tree or the rock as a mere phenomenon, as an object in the world of objects. Whoever has clearly understood that politics and religion and knowledge and art and law come to me from the first quite differently from objects, can never doubt that their systematic connection must be most sharply separated from all the sciences which connect impressions of objects, and is falsified if the historical disciplines are treated simply as parts of the sciences of phenomena--for instance, as parts of sociology, the science of society as a psycho-physical object.