The historical system of will-connections is similar to the system of object-connections, not only in its starting in the immediate experience, but further in its also seeking identities. Without this feature history would not offer to our understanding real connections. We must link the will-attitudes of men by showing the identity of the alternatives. Just as the physical thing is substituted by a large number of atoms which remain identical in the causal changes, in the same way the personality is substituted by an endless manifoldness of decisions and becomes linked with the historical community by the thought that each of these partial decisions refers to an alternative which is identical with that of other persons. And yet there remains a most essential difference between the historical and the causal connection. In a world of things the mere identical continuity is sufficient to determine the phenomena of any given moment. In a world of will the identity of alternatives cannot determine beforehand the actual decision; that belongs to the free activity of the subject. If this factor of freedom were left out, man would be made an object and history a mere appendix of natural science. The connection of the historian can therefore never be a necessary one, however much we may observe empirical regularities. If there were no identities, our reason could not find connection in history; but if the historical connections were necessary, like the causal ones, it would not be history. The historian is, therefore, unable and without the ambition to look into the future like the naturalist; his domain is the past. Yet will-attitudes and will-acts can also be brought into necessary connection; that is, we can conceive will-acts as teleologically identical with each other and exempt from the freedom of the individual. That is clearly possible only if they are conceived as beyond the freedom of individual decision and related to the over-individual subject. The question is then no longer how this special man wills and decides, but how far a certain will-decision binds every possible individual who performs this act if he is to share our common world of will and meaning. Such an over-individual connection of will-acts is what we call the logical connection. It shares with all other connections the dependence upon the category of identity. The logical connection shows how far one act or combination of acts involves, and thus is partially identical with, a new combination. This logical connection has, in common with the causal connection, necessity; and in common with the historical connection, teleological character. Any individual will-act of historical life may be treated for certain purposes as such a starting-point of over-individual relations; it would then lead to that scientific treatment which gives us an interpretation, for instance, of law. Such interpretative sciences belong to the system of history in the widest sense of the word.