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Kant's Manner of Asking About the Thing

5. This realm of nature, axiomatically determined in outline by this project, now also requires for the bodies and corpuscles within it a mode of access (Zugangsart) appropriate to the axiomatically predetermined objects. The mode of questioning and the coginitive determination of nature are now no longer ruled by traditional opinions and concepts. Bodies have no concealed qualities, powers and capacities. Natural bodies are now only what they show themselves as, within this projected realm. Things now show themselves only in the relations of places and time points and in the measures of mass and working forces. How they show themselves is prefigured in the project. Therefore, the project also determines the mode of taking in and studying of what shows itself, experience, the experiri. However, because inquiry is now predetermined by the outline of the project, a line of questioning can be instituted in such a way that it poses conditions in advance to which nature must answer in one way or another. Upon the basis of the mathematical, the experientia becomes the modern experiment. Modern science is experimental because of the mathematical project. The experimenting urge to the facts is a necessary consequence of the preceding mathematical skipping (Überspringen) of all facts. But where this skipping ceases or becomes weak, mere facts as such are collected, and positivism arises.

6. Because the project establishes a uniformity of all bodies according to relations of space, time, and motion, it also makes possible and requires a universal uniform measure as an essential determinant of things, i.e., numerical measurement. The mathematical project of Newtionian bodies leads to the development of a certian "mathematics" in the narrow sense. The new form of modern science did not arise because mathematics became an essential determinant. Rather, that mathematics, and a particular kind of mathematics, could come into play and had come into play is a consequence of the mathematical