Quotes from 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.

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

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.

The lived experiences which could not find adequate scientific expression in the substance doctrine of rational psychology were now validated in light of new and better methods.

In the real life-process, willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects.

On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.

The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.

All science is experiential; but all experience must be related back to and derives its its validity from the conditions and context of consciousness in which it arises, i.e., the totality of our nature.

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

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.

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

The lived experiences which could not find adequate scientific expression in the substance doctrine of rational psychology were now validated in light of new and better methods.

If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.