4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST importance of analysing consciousness as the only means by which one could proceed from merely egoistic experience to an understanding of the unique spirit characterizing each specific form of human culture arising in history. Rickert maintained that there were two methods in science. The natural sciences dealt with materials which are the same everywhere and which could therefore be comprehended in universal laws covering all space and time. This is the method of generalized abstraction. The other method is one of individualized abstraction which Rickert considered to be appropriate for the historical sciences. It enables us to understand (Verstehen, i.e. 'understanding') the relations between phenomena and moral values, the nexuses most pertinent for comprehending the infinite variety of human culture "each one of which has to be grasped by a particular understanding of its own uniqueness. What is thus grasped is a life style, a special form of human living, its modes of thought, its ethical norms, its aesthetic achievements".2 Thus, Rickert's methodological observations and Ditthey's search for the 'unique spirit' are combined in what is mentioned above a^ the 'Dilthey-Rickert' approach of Weber. My reference to hermeneutics should be subject to several qualifications if we bring in the claims and counter-claims of the empirical method, scientistic knowledge and hermeneutical cognition. More relevant for our present theme is the point that "Dilthey's main contribution to social scientific thought consists, of course, in his ^position of the method of Verstehen in the 'historical Geisteswissenschaften9 which occupied Max Weber's methodological reflections and which provided the models for all subsequent approaches concerned with the understanding of'action'".3 Weber aims at exploring the factors which motivate and sustain the capitalist system. An exposition was necessary which would bear upon the rich congrucncy of such diverse aspects of a culture as religion and economics 4 Neither in The Protestant Ethic, nor in his General Economic History, did Weber postulate a theory of generalized historical evolution. He was^not proving a causal relation between protestantism and capitalism. His main concern lay in an investigation of the influence of certain religious ideas on the emergence of the ethos of an economic system. This should be clear from the following observations in The Protestant Ethic : We have no intention whatever of maintaining that the spirit of capitalism . could only have arisen as the result of certain effects of the Reformation, or even that capitalism as an economic system is a creation of the Reformation ..In view of the tremendous confusion of interdependent influences between the material basis, the forms of social and political organization, and the ideas current in the time of the Reformation, we can only proceed by investigating whether and at what points certain correlations between forms of religious belief and practical ethics can be worked out.5