Historiography, which ever more urgently is developing into the writing of universal history, accomplishes its entrapping securing in the area that offers itself to its theory as history. The word Historie (historein) [historiography] means to explore and make visible, and therefore names a kind of representing. In contrast, the word Geschichte [history] means that which takes its course inasmuch as it is prepared and disposed in such and such a way, i.e., set in order and sent forth, destined. Historiography is the exploration of history. But historiographical observation does not first create history itself. Everything "historiographical,"" everything represented and established after the manner of historiography, is historical [geschichtlich], i.e., grounded upon the destining resident in happening. But history is never necessarily historiographical.

Whether history reveals itself in its essence only through and for historiography or whether it is not rather concealed through historiographical objectification remains for the science of history something it cannot itself decide. This, however, is decided : In the theory of historiography, history holds sway as that which is not to be gotten around.

Philology makes the literature of nations and peoples into the object of its explanation and interpretation. The written word of literature is at any given time the spoken word of a language. When philology deals with language, it treats it in accordance with the objective ways of looking at language that are established through grammar, etymology, and comparative linguistics, through the art of composition and poetics.

Yet language speaks without becoming literature and entirely independently of whether literature for its part attains to the objectness with which the determinations of a literary science correspond. In the theory of philology language holds sway as that which is not to be gotten around.

Nature, man, history, language, all remain for the aforementioned sciences that which is not to be gotten around, already holding sway from within the objectness belonging to them-remain that toward which at any given time those sciences are directed, but that which, in the fullness of its coming to presence, they can never encompass by means of their representing.²⁸

28. durch ihr Vorstellen nie um-stellen können.