Whoever studies history and society is everywhere confronted by abstract entities such as art, science, state, society, and religion. These are fog-banks that obstruct our view of reality, yet cannot themselves be grasped. Just as substantial forms, mystical forces, and essences once stood between the eye of the scientist and the laws governing atoms and molecules, so these entities veil the reality of socio-historical life, the interaction of psychophysical life-units as regulated by the conditions of nature and the natural genealogical articulation of human life. I would like to demonstrate how to see this reality--an art of seeing which needs to be practiced for a long time, like the art of perceiving spatial forms--and to drive away these fog-banks and phantoms.
Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 1, ed. Makreel and Rodi, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1989), 93.
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