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II. Echo [146-148]

sciences as mechanisms of interconnections of accuracies is the rigor that belongs to them. Every science is rigorous inasmuch as it must be "positive" and individualized with respect to any given region.

9. The rigor of a science unfolds and is accomplished in the ways of proceeding (depending on the disciplinary field) and of operating (carrying out the investigation and the presentation), in the "method." This way of proceeding places the field of objects in each case in a definitive direction of explainability, which already basically guarantees that there will always be a "result." (Something always comes out.)

The basic character of proceeding in every explaining is to follow and to lay out in advance individual series and sequences of consecutive cause-effect relations. Although not recognized as such, the machinational essence of beings not only justifies but also requires, in boundless intensification, this thinking in causalities that is assured of results—which strictly speaking are only "if-then" relationships in the form of when-then (to which the statistics of modem physics also belongs, which does not at all overcome "causality" but merely brings it to light in its machinational essence). To assume that one is able, with this apparently "free" causality, to grasp more easily what is "alive" merely betrays the secretly pt conviction that one will one day bring what is alive also under the jurisdiction of explanation. This step is all the closer because, on the side of history. i.e., that realm opposed to nature, the purely "historical" ["historische"], respectively “prehistorical’ method dominates, which thinks totally in terms of causalities and makes life” and what is experienceable” available to causal verification and sees in it exclusively the form of historical knowing. To admit that "accident" and "fate" co-determine historical events proves all the more the exclusive domination of thinking in terms of causality, insofar as accident and fate merely represent the imprecise and not unequivocally calculable cause-effect relations. That historical beings could have a totally different way of being (grounded on Da-sein) can never be made knowable to history [as a discipline], because history would then have to renounce itself. For, as part of the domain in which it runs its course, and which is established in advance, history as science has self-evidence, which unconditionally fits an average understandability—an understandability which is demanded by the essence of science as the order of accuracies within the domination and steering of all that is objective in service to usage and education.

10. Insofar as the task that is appropriate solely to "science" is the thorough investigation of its region, science carries within itself the