subject-object relation, which I took to be most general, is apparently only an historical variation of the relation of man to the thing, so far as things can become objects . . .
Teacher: . . . even have become objects before they attained their nature as things.
Scholar: The same is true of the corresponding historical change of the human being to an ego . . .
Teacher: . . . which likewise emerged before the nature of man could return to itself . . .
Scientist: . . . providing we do not regard the coining of man into the animal rationale as final . . .
Scholar: . . . which would hardly be possible after today's conversation.
Scientist: I hesitate to decide upon this so quickly. However, something else has become clear to me. In the relation between ego and object there is concealed something historical, something which belongs to the history of man's nature.
Teacher: Only so far as man's nature does not receive its stamp from man, but from what we call that-which-regions and its regioning, does the history you presage become the history of that-which-regions.
Scientist: I can't follow you that far yet. I am content if some obscurity in the relation between ego and object is removed for me by this insight into its historical character. For when I decided in favor of the methodological type of analysis in the physical sciences, you said that this way of looking at it was historical.
Scholar: You strongly objected to that statement.