Such a position is quite permissible to a science that devotes itself exclusively to technique, _i.e._ aims at nothing more than to measure and calculate in advance, for it is only re-actual proceedings that admit of being measured and calculated in advance. When such and such a planet will occupy such and such a position in the heavens, this admits of being calculated beforehand with the most perfect accuracy. But whether this next moment I shall twirl my thumb to the right or to the left, that no science, no academy in the world can compute in advance. The position which science takes up towards the world--a rejection in principle of all that is not perceptible to sense--of necessity involves restriction to the re-actual world, and therewith the mechanical conception of the play of world-events. Yet once more. This conception is perfectly legitimate so long as it confines itself to the re-actual world. But it becomes an anomaly the moment it seeks to pass beyond this re-actual world--the moment a man tries to read the actual world, the living processes, according to the same scheme--that of a falling. For here it is actual forces that are at work; here the question as to actual forces declines to be eliminated or exempted by acts of intellectual violence that by their repugnancy to common sense bring about their own downfall. Later on we shall have to revert to these attempts to interpret physically living beings, the entire man as a falling, a mere process of adjustment, and to explain consciousness in purely mechanical fashion. Though one should be able to “read” the animal organism after physical formulas in never so far-reaching a manner, though one should be able to co-ordinate the whole process of alimentation, the housekeeping of life, in never so perfect a fashion with the law of the conservation of energy, nothing has been gained withal that might settle the question as to what exactly that is which keeps this mechanism going: such a question is never once touched on at all; nay, by this method of procedure it is deliberately pushed on one side, as much and as long as ever is possible, until straightforward, natural thinking rises in revolt against such behaviour as a learned pastime and demands actuality. Hence:-- That particular form of mental life which rejects in principle what is not perceptible to sense, thereby of necessity is confined to the re-actual world. If it seeks to encroach upon actual processes, it must arbitrarily leave out of consideration that in them which is _essential_, the forces at work in them,--whereby it falls into absurdities that speedily take their revenge by raising problems that are insoluble.