Science occupies herself with problems in variation and permutation. How were it possible for us to know so terribly much if we actually knew anything? Exact science has to do only with relations. She does not wish to know anything at all about things themselves. Any such knowledge would be as inconvenient to her as would be to an advocate a too far-reaching confession on the part of his clients. It is only this utter absence of misgiving as to things themselves which really makes possible scientific methods of procedure. It is men of science themselves who are responsible--partly intentionally and partly unintentionally--for the mistaken, exaggerated ideas as to the nature and value of science current among the laity. One does not quite like to let people peep into pots. One much prefers to appear before an astounded public with results imposing by reason of their completeness. With a certain kind of diffidence--intelligible enough, by the way, to him who can see behind the scenes--which, however, with no little skill is so managed that along with the simple keynote quite half a dozen overtones vibrate in unison,--hopes, allusions to the future--one tenders one’s gift to the world, but does not at all care about acquainting that world with the fact that at bottom this gift is the simple product of a scientific game of blind-man’s buff, and “shut-your-eyes-and-hit-the-pot!” If it does not suit one way perhaps it will the other. Every theory is the outcome of trying, of testing. It was thus that Galileo himself adjusted his intuition with respect to the law of falling bodies. Thus did Kepler all his life “play” against nature and finally--once for all--win the game; and so to all eternity will this playing against, and these efforts at adjustment, go on. So to all eternity will descriptions in the form of explanations be brought forward--descriptions which, strictly speaking, will convey no more than Reuter’s _bon mot_ about destitution to the effect that it is the result of “poverty.” I can describe with increasing exactitude the fall of a body and formulate the laws that govern the same. But all these descriptive details only assume the character of an explanation through men in each case interpolating as adequate cause the attractive force of the earth. This latter, however, is purely the creature of thought, a working hypothesis pure and simple, advanced with the sole object of making possible the comprehension of all single instances of falling. From the purely epistemological point of view, I am equally entitled to say that the force of attraction results from the falling; for it is only from this, from a definite number of single instances of the same, that the theory of the “attractive force of the earth” is obtained.