It is on this basis that Du Bois was able to defend African Americans from the accusations of the scientific racists of his day even while accepting certain aspects of that science—such as race essentialism—that most scientists today would reject. In so doing, Du Bois raises important questions regarding the relationship between the sciences and the humanities. While Du Bois was able to make an argument against racism through his scientific approach to humane disciplines like history and philosophy, the arguments he formulated rebutted ideas that were accepted as scientific fact in his day. By framing his life as a refutation of the scientific racism popular in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and by applying scientific methods to the humane arts in an attempt to rebut racial pseudoscience, Du bois helped to define the relationship between the humanities and the sciences and points to a healthy engagement between the two in which each can inform the other. A scientism which ignores the human element severs itself from the experiential facts of the lives it hopes to explain while a humanism that disvalues scientific ways of knowing is incomplete and likely to result in navel-gazing prognostications with little meaning for the real world. By bringing the two together, Du Bois used his training in the humanities and his knowledge of the sciences as means by which to explain and to change for the better the lives of millions of people.