In this book, called "Descriptive Psychology" in the Russian translation, Wilhelm Diltey criticizes the explanatory approach in psychology, in which they try to study a person's mental life using methods that have been developed and shown to be productive in the field of natural sciences, and offers his project "descriptive" psychology, in which the main method is the understanding reduced to humanitarian and scientific rigor. Such descriptive psychology can, according to Dilthey, become a fundamental discipline for the entire sphere of humanitarian knowledge.