 This theory of objective validity has some notable consequences. First, the possibility of objective validity requires that we postulate, as a regulative ideal, a final science. The unity of knowledge through laws that the Marburgers point to as the foundation of objective validity has clearly not yet been achieved: there are still phenomena that have not yet been explained, and our current theories are certainly not going to be the final word. But it is clearly the case that even now we can know objects, even if our knowledge is partial. If unity through laws makes objectivity validity possible and that unity has not yet been achieved, how then can we know any objects at all? We have to postulate that our current, only partially unified knowledge can progress in a law-like way into a unique, final theory. Such a final theory can never actually be achieved, because the task of knowledge is infinite—there is always more to understand, deeper explanations to give. The postulated final theory is like the asymptote that a curve never quite reaches. This viewpoint—that speaking of an object contains the demand for unity of knowledge, that this task is infinite, that we must therefore postulate the possibility of its completion—Natorp calls the “genetic view of knowledge” (1910: Ch.1, §4–5). The genetic view delivers a unique way of cashing out the “transcendence” of the object. The fact that the object is independent of knowledge, in the sense that it always transcends our knowledge of it, is expressed by the infinity of the task of knowledge. And the fact that the object is the standard for knowledge is expressed by the postulate that the course of knowledge is moving asymptotically towards a unique (though infinite) endpoint as its goal. Second, the emphasis on lawfulness gives the Marburgers a satisfying explanation of the application of mathematics to the objects of natural science: the laws of natural science are mathematical, and there would be no objects if there were no laws of natural science. Third, since objectivity is explained in terms of laws, and laws are a special kind of universal judgment, the Marburg theory of objective validity emphasizes the priority of judgments over concepts (Cohen 1902: §10). As Cohen memorably put it, modifying Galileo’s phrase: the book of nature is written in sentences (with mathematics as its letters, and the a priori principles of pure knowledge as its syntax) (1902: 204, 484).