These “values,” to which every historical act in its singularity has to be related in order to become an element of real history, are they after all nothing but those groups of the products of civilisation which in fact absorb the interest of men? Is it to groups of cultural phenomena, such as arts, science, the State, religion, war, economics, and so on, that “historical” facts have to be related? Yes, as far as I understand our author, it is simply to these or other even less important groups of cultural effects--cultural “cumulations,” to apply our term--that a single action of a man or a group of men must bear some relation in order to become important historically. But what does that mean? Is the relation to such “values” to be regarded as really rendering history equal to the sciences of nature in philosophical importance? In the first place, there is no more agreement about such “values” than there is in the field of morals. Imagine, for instance, a religious enthusiast or recluse writing history! I fancy there would be very little mention of warriors and politicians: war and politics would not be “values” in *any* sense to such a man. And we know that there are others to whom those products of civilised life rank amongst the first. Rickert well notes that there is one great objection to his doctrine--the character of universality[167] is wanting to his history, or rather to the values forming its basis; for there cannot be, or at least there actually is not at present, a *consensus omnium* with regard to these “values.” [167] The word “universality” to be understood here in quite an unpretentious quasi-popular meaning, not strictly epistemologically. I am convinced that Rickert is right in his conception of real “history” as the knowledge of the single acts of mankind. But this conception proves just the contrary of what Rickert hoped to prove; for history in this sense is moulded by the actual products of culture, that is, by the effects which actually exist as groups of cultural processes, and it cannot be moulded by anything else; the historian correlates history with what *interests* him personally. Here now we have met definitively the ambiguous word: history indeed is to end in “interest” and in being “interesting.” There is nothing like a real “value” in any sense underlying history; the word *value* therefore would better give place to the term “centre of interest”--a collection of stamps may be such a “centre.” History, then, as the knowledge of cultural singularities, is “interesting,” and its aspects change with the interests of the person who writes history: there is no commonly accepted foundation of history.[168] [168] To avoid mistakes I wish to say here most emphatically that, according to Rickert, the method of history is regarded as completely *free* from subjectivity as soon as its “values” are once *established*. But this cannot avail to save the theory.