 To pull our strands together, thinking in the strict sense is scientific thinking, for it alone is generative of knowledge, i.e., objective truth. Science (and therefore knowledge) as a matter of fact evolves through time: science is a fieri. However, this evolution or fieri is not unregulated, but moves in a continuous pursuit of ever more precise determinations of experience: this pursuit is literally called “method”. These determinations of experience just are the objects of science. The philosophical task therefore is to analyze the condition of possibility of the regularity of this methodical determination of experience. Natorp (like Cohen; 1902: 449) identifies this condition as hypothesis, interpreted as law (Ge-setz, posit); experience in the strict sense is only possible given a law (Gesetz) that functions as its interpretational groundwork or foundation (Grundlegung). The first hypothesis or primal posit then must be the law of lawfulness, viz., the rational postulate that experience, in order to be Erfahrung, and not mere Erlebnis, must accord with law, i.e., be grounded on a rational foundation (cf. Natorp 1887: 285; 1911e; 1917: 246). This categorical imperative, that all its experience fall under law, is the originary act of reason wherein lies its ultimate autonomy; it is the regulative principle of the continuous, orderly flow of  experience.[23]  As a general, purely formal law it regulates the particular hypotheses, which in turn generate or ground particular objects of Erfahrung (such as “Mars”, “electricity”, “atom”, or “gravity”) in the regulated process of their ever wider and ever more rigorous determination. How it does this is a separate problem, one that Natorp attempts to solve through his system of categories, treated in the next section.