To liberate History, then, from that thraldom to the observers’ prejudices which in our own case has made of it nothing more than a record of a partial past leading up to an accidental present, with the ideals and interests of that present as criteria of the achievement and possibility, is the object of all that follows. II _Nature_ and _History_[77] are the opposite extreme terms of man’s range of possibilities, whereby he is enabled to order the actualities about him as a picture of the world. An actuality is Nature in so far as it assigns things-becoming their place as things-become, and History in so far as it orders things-become with reference to their becoming. An actuality as an evocation of mind is contemplated, and as an assurance of the senses is critically comprehended, the first being exemplified in the worlds of Plato, Rembrandt, Goethe and Beethoven, the second in the worlds of Parmenides, Descartes, Kant and Newton. Cognition in the strict sense of the word is that act of experience of which the completed issue is called “Nature.” The cognized and “Nature” are one and the same. The symbol of mathematical number has shown us that the aggregate of things cognized is the same as the world of things mechanically defined, things correct once and for all, things brought under law. _Nature is the sum of the law-imposed necessities._ There are only laws of _Nature_. No physicist who understands his duty would wish to transcend these limits. His task is to establish an ordered code which not only includes all the laws that he can find in the picture of Nature that is proper to himself but, further, represents that picture exhaustively and without remainder. Contemplation or vision (Anschauen), on the other hand—I may recall Goethe’s words: “vision is to be carefully distinguished from seeing”—, is that act of experience which _is itself history because it is itself a fulfilling_. That which has been lived is that which has happened, and it is history. (Erlebtes ist Geschehenes, ist Geschichte.) Every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated. It carries the hall-mark of Direction (“Time”), of _irreversibility_. That which has happened is thenceforth counted with the become and not with the becoming, with the stiffened and not the living, and belongs beyond recall to the past. Our feeling of world-fear has its sources here. Everything cognized, on the contrary, is _timeless_, neither past nor future but simply “there,” and consequently permanently valid, as indeed the very constitution of natural law requires that it should be. Law and the domain of law are _anti-historical_. They exclude incident and casuality. The laws of nature are forms of rigorous and therefore inorganic necessity. It becomes easy to see why mathematics, as the ordering of things-become by number, is _always and exclusively_ associated with laws and causality.