8. The organizing of knowledge (knowledge of an essential truth experienced in advance) (cf. Proposition 2) is carried out as the building up and building out of an explanatory nexus whose possibility requires the thorough binding of the investigation to the respective subject area and indeed from the viewpoint into which the latter is shifted. This binding of the sciences as institutings of nexuses of correct findings is what constitutes the rigor proper to them. Every science is in itself rigorous according to the way it must be "positive" and the way it must individuate itself through the respective viewpoint it adopts toward its respective area.
9. The development of the rigor of a science is carried out in the "method," i.e., in the way of approach (the adopting of a point of view on the subject area) and the way of proceeding (the execution of both the investigation and the presentation). The way of approach brings the domain of objects in each case into a determinate direction of explainability, one which as a matter of principle already assures the inevitability of a "result." (There is always some finding.)
The basic procedure in all explanation is the pursuit and anticipatory establishment of individual series and chains of continuous cause-effect relations. The machinational essence of beings, although not recognized as such, does not merely justify but even requires in an increase without limit this thinking in "causalities" which is assured of results. These "causalities," strictly speaking, are merely "if-then" relations in the form of "when this-then that" (here also belongs the "statistics" of modern physics, which in no way overcomes "causality" but simply brings to light its machinational essence). The opinion that "living things" can more readily be grasped with this apparently "free" causality simply reveals the hidden basic conviction that even what is alive will one day be placed within the jurisdiction of explanation. This step lies all the closer in view of the fact that on the side of the region opposite to nature, i.e., in history, what predominates is the purely "historiological" or "pre-historiological" method which thinks entirely in terms of causality, makes "life" and any "lived experience" accessible to causal calculation, and therein alone sees the form of historical "knowledge." The admission that "accident" and "destiny" are co-determinative in history is all the stronger evidence of the exclusive dominance of causal thinking, inasmuch as "accident" and "destiny" do present cause-effect relations, ones which merely resist precise and univocal calculation. Historiology could