designate thus all these judgments as results of a special disposition of the understanding. We never understand why just this cause demands just this effect so long as we rely on such vague and mystical power of our reason to link the world by causality. But the situation changes at once if we go still further back in the categories of our understanding. While a mere demand for causality never explains what cause is to be linked with what effect, the vagueness disappears when we understand this demand for causality itself as the product of a more fundamental demand for identity. That an object remains identical with itself does not need for us any further interpretation. That is the ultimate presupposition of our thought, and where a complete identity is found nothing demands further explanation. All scientific effort aims at so rethinking different experiences that they can be regarded as partially identical, and every discovery of necessary connection is ultimately a demonstration of identity. If we seek connections with the final aim to understand them as necessary, we must conceive the world of our objects in such a way that it is possible to consider the successive experiences as parts of a self-identical world; that is, as parts of a world in which no substance and no energy can disappear or appear anew. To reach this end it is obviously needed that we eliminate from the world of objects all that cannot be conceived as identically returning in a new experience; that is, all that belongs to the present experience only. We do eliminate this by taking it up conceptually into the subject and calling it psychical, and thus leaving to the object merely that which is conceived as belonging to the world of everybody's experience, that is, of over-individual experience. The whole history of natural science is first of all the gigantic development of this transformation, resolution, and reconstruction. The objects of experience are re-thought till everything is eliminated which cannot be conceived as identical with itself in the experiences of all individuals and thus as belonging to the over-individual world. All the substitutions of atoms for the real thing, and of energies for the real changes, are merely conceptional schemes to satisfy this demand.