See p. 55, also Vol. II, pp. 25 et seq. Footnote 78: “Anti-historical,” the expression which we apply to a decidedly systematic valuation, is to be carefully distinguished from “ahistorical.” The beginning of the IV Book (53) of Schopenhauer’s _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_ affords a good illustration of the man who thinks anti-historically, that is, deliberately for theoretical reasons suppresses and rejects the historical in himself— something that is actually there. The ahistoric Greek nature, on the contrary, neither possesses nor understands it. ----- III There emerge, then, as the two basic elements of all world-picturing, the principle of Form (Gestalt) and the principle of Law (Gesetz). The more decidedly a particular world-picture shows the traits of “Nature,” the more unconditionally law and number prevail in it; and the more purely intuitive the picture of the world as eternally becoming, the more alien to numbers its manifold and intangible elements. “Form is something mobile, something becoming, something passing. The doctrine of formation is the doctrine of transformation. Metamorphosis is the key to the whole alphabet of Nature,” so runs a note of Goethe’s, marking already the methodic difference between his famous “exact percipient fancy” which quietly lets itself be worked upon by the living,[79] and the exact killing procedure of modern physics. But whatever the process, a remainder consisting of so much of the alien element as is present is always found. In strict natural sciences this remainder takes the form of the inevitable _theories and hypotheses_ which are imposed on, and leaven, the stiff mass of number and formula. In historical research, it appears as _chronology_, the number-structure of dates and statistics which, alien though number is to the essence of becoming, is so thoroughly woven around and into the world of historical forms that it is never felt to be intrusive. For it is devoid of mathematical import. Chronological number distinguishes uniquely-occurring actualities, mathematical number constant possibilities. The one sharpens the images and works up the outlines of epoch and fact for the understanding eye. But the other _is itself_ the law which it seeks to establish, the end and aim of research. Chronological number is a scientific means of pioneering borrowed from the science of sciences, mathematics, and used as such without regard to its specific properties. Compare, for instance, the meaning of the two symbols 12 × 8 = 96, and 18 October, 1813.[80] It is the same difference, in the use of figures, that prose and poetry present in the use of words.