Pattern and meaning in History: Thoughts on History and Society

Benjamin Nelson:"The more carefully we study the background of phenomenology and existentialism, the more certain we become of Dilthey's great influence on Max Weber, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and others concerned with the understanding of human life in its actual passage. Like William James, to whom he is often compared, he struggles to keep the theories of the human sciences faithful to the fullness and flow of immediate experience. Finally, those who long for contact with monuments of vast learning and strict method have only to look at his path-breaking researches on interpretations of world and man in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Schleiermacher, and the young Hegel."