a man will never find out what history is; no more than a mathematician can show by way of mathematics—by means of his science, that is, and ultimately by mathematical formulate—what mathematics is. The essence of their sphere—history, art, poetry, language, nature, man, God—remains inaccessible to the sciences. At the same time, however, the sciences would constantly fall into the void if they did not operate within these spheres. The essence of the spheres I have named is the concern of thinking. As the sciences qua sciences have no access to this concern, it must be said that they are not thinking. Once this is put in words, it tends to sound at first as though thinking fancied itself superior to the sciences. Such arrogance, if and where it exists, would be unjustified; thinking always knows essentially less than the sciences precisely because it operates where it could think the essence of history, art, nature, language—and yet is still not capable of it. The sciences are fully entitled to their name, which means fields of knowledge, because they have infinitely more knowledge than thinking does. And yet there is another side in every science which that science as such can never reach: the essential nature and origin of its sphere, the essence and essential origin of the manner of knowing which it cultivates, and other things besides. The sciences remain of necessity on the one side. In this sense they are one-sided, but in such a way that the other side nonetheless always appears as well. The sciences' one-sidedness retains its own many-sidedness. But that many-sidedness may expand to such proportions that the one-sidedness on which it is based no longer catches our eye. And when man no longer sees the one side as one side, he has lost sight of the other side as well. What sets the two sides apart, what lies between them, is covered up, so to speak. Everything is leveled to one level. Our minds hold views on all and everything, and view all things in the identical way. Today every newspaper,