Because thinking itself is energy, therefore it does not _have_ the faculty, the power of adjustment, but _is_ this power itself. Thinking in every form, even in the most vulgar, is a self-adjustment, and the scientific form is distinguished from the lay form only in this, that it is _directed_, set in play towards definite ends; hence, whatever is troublesome is here dropped with more skill, and on the doing of this, in the last resort, all scientific adjustment is founded. Rightly does E. Mach say, in his _Erhaltung der Arbeit_: “Science has almost made greater progress through that which she has known how to ignore than by that which she has taken into account.” Here for a first occasion I would bring that reproach against science which in what follows in treating of her problems will be frequently repeated: She deprives us of the sense of actuality_; or_, rather, places it in a false object, the re-actual, whereby she does just as much harm to honest thinking as faith does by placing it in a non-actual, in the transcendental. There is only _one_ actuality in the world--that which I experience as such. To deprive us of this pure actuality, to direct our attention towards a world that can be “read” in the form of work done--this I call a turning of genuine thinkers into tradesmen whose one and only concern is the establishing of advantageous relations with the external world. Gradually to win back the lost sense of actuality, gradually again to arouse the feeling that there is a given something present which as such cannot be proven, not because unprovable in itself but because proving itself by itself--a given something representing no mere _possibility_ but a _power_--this will be the first task of a time which itself feels in every nerve and fibre that there’s something rotten. It is this blind running against all the facts of life, this courage of pure folly ever and again excited and supported by an overheated scientific imagination lacking in all self-control--it is this that we must leave behind would we make good our claim to be mentally adult.