If, as Charles Taylor argues, the human sciences are not simply sciences of concrete fact but, instead, are narratives of self-clarification of the Western experience of modernity, what does the shift from questions of ontology to questions of epistemology say about the transition to modernity? Part of the answer lies in the refusal to address the Big Questions in an integral manner. Whatever effect the development of the natural sciences has had on displacing traditional religious cosmologies, surely the development of the human sciences has played an equal, if not greater, role, because they have reduced the modern search for meaning to empirical sciences of concrete facts. The Kantian desire to formulate a newer, critical metaphysics that could meet the rigors of an empirical science, by being aware of its presuppositions and limits, culminates in Dilthey and Weber's pronouncing the end of speculative metaphysics and accepting the death of God. But the metaphysical need for a complete set of answers to a complete set of questions, as well as the metaphysical need for otherworldly transcendence, constantly foils their respective efforts to elaborate the scientific nature of the study of the Geist and the Sozial.