befalls us. What strikes us, what concerns us; affection, sensation. Receptivity and sensibility and the sense organs.
2. approaching something, looking around, looking over, exploring, pacing off.
3. approaching as testing, asking one's own questions, whether when this—then that if this—then that.
At levels 2 and 3, always already a more or less determined something that is sought. At 2, what strikes me, what I encounter without my complicity, is indeterminate. At 3, an intervention or some other sharpening of the approach: dissecting, magnifying with specific aids, instruments, tools, which are themselves material things. Loupe, microscope, making vision more acute; conditions of observability. Gathering all sorts of observations also about "regularities" in a quite indeterminate order; things that are especially striking.
4. the fact that the instrumentally-aided approaching and testing aim at the exposition of a rule. Anticipatory grasp of a regularity: e.g., when so much of this-then so much of that follows. The "when this-then that" as ever again something constant (ὄν). Testing, running a test; Aristotle, Metaphysics A I: ἐμπειρία, ὑπόληψις ["deeming"], the "when this-then each time that." Attempt, not only "testing," but bringing the object "into temptation," setting a trap, making it that such and such is the case—that such and such is not the case
5. The approaching and testing, the aiming at a rule, in such a way that altogether what is regular, and only this, determines in advance the objective in its own domain. The domain not graspable otherwise than through the exposition of rules (to test possibilities of regularity, to tryout "nature" itself) and specifically such that the rule is one of giving order to the measure and of possible measurability (space, time). What is the fundamental significance of that for tools as material and natural things?
Now for the first time the possibility, but also the necessity, of modern experimentation. Why necessary? The "exact" experiment (the one that measures); the inexact. Experimentation possible only where an anticipatory grasp of an essential domain of objects which is determined entirely by quantitative rules; and the anticipatory grasp is what determines the experiment in its essence.
Experiri—experientia—intuitus (argumentum ex re)
stands in opposition to componere scripta de aliqua re, i.e., the compiling of previous opinions and citing of authorities, and the mere logical discussion of these opinions in order to discover the most insightful opinion