Cause and effect. We call it “explanation,” but “description” is what distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science. We are better at describing–we explain just as little as all our predecessors. We have uncovered a diverse succession where the naïve man and investigator of older cultures saw only two different things, “cause” and “effect”, as they said; we have perfected the picture of becoming but haven’t got over, got behind the picture. The series of “causes” faces us much more completely in each case; we reason, “This and that must proceed for that to follow”–but we haven’t thereby understood anything. The specifically qualitative aspect for example of every chemical process, still appears to be a “miracle”, as does every locomotion; no one has “explained” the push. And how could we explain! We are operating only with things that do not exist-with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces. How is explanation to be at all possible when we first turn everything into a picture–our picture! It is enough to view science as an attempt to humanize things as faithfully as possible; we learn to describe ourselves more and more precisely as we describe things and their succession. Cause and effect: there is probably never such a duality; in truth a continuum faces us, from which we isolate a few pieces, just as we always perceive a movement only as isolated points, i.e. do not really see, but infer. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; it is a suddenness only for us. There is an infinite number of processes that allude us in the second of suddenness. An intellect that saw cause and effect as a continuum, not, as we do, as arbitrary division and dismemberment–that saw the stream of the event–would reject the concept of cause and effect and deny all determinedness.