sionally seems to look upon Verstehen as a fruitful source of hypotheses about behaviour hypotheses that must then be subjected to empirical scrutiny and validation. And in doing this it is quite in order to bring into play forensic skills and quantitative methods in the classic Durk heimian fashion. Unlike some of his intellectual heirs, Weber by no means regarded the use of statistical techniques as an exercise in mystification or as a distortion of the subtle realities of social life. Statistical probability was an important check upon the general validity of any proposition At the same time, caution was called for in attaching explanatory significance to numerical correlations. The fact that two variables showed a consistently high degree of correlation would not in itself suffice to establish a causal connection between them. For causation to be proven it would be necessary to show that the relationship between the variables was intuitively meaningful. If it could be demon strated that the rise and fall of the pound on the foreign exchange markets exactly paralleled the rise and fall in the divorce rate, we would not be warranted in claiming a causal link between two events. There is no plausible sequence of motivation' that connects actions on the money market with decisions about the fate of marriage As Weber expresses it