the objective study of texts) being preeminent among them. Due to Schleiermacher, followed closely by Dilthey, the notion of hermeneutics as a matter of practical exegetical operation between text and reader is generalized to include much broader concerns related to the nature of human understanding. Schleiermacher was the first to move hermeneutics away from being a corpus of rules that are applied to texts, to its being representative of universal principles or laws of understanding that transcend