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

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.

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

Wilhelm Dilthey Quotes