Science in general may be defined as the totality established through an interconnection of true propositions. The world is the totality of facts, not of things. Now the entities within the world are Things—Things of Nature, and Things `invested with value'. It is essential to a thing that it can be a constituent part of an atomic fact. In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in an atomic fact the possibility of that atomic fact must already be prejudged in the thing. It would, so to speak, appear as an accident, when to a thing that could exist alone on its own account, subsequently a state of affairs could be made to fit. If things can occur in atomic facts, this possibility must already lie in them. In the projecting of the understanding, entities are disclosed in their possibility. The character of the possibility corresponds, on each occasion, with the kind of Being of the entity which is understood. Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things. Taken strictly, there `is' no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is.
If I can think of an object in the context of an atomic fact, I cannot think of it apart from the possibility of this context. The thing is independent, in so far as it can occur in all possible circumstances, but this form of independence is a form of connexion with the atomic fact, a form of dependence. (It is impossible for words to occur in two different ways, alone and in the proposition.) If I know an object, then I also know all the possibilities of its occurrence in atomic facts. (Every such possibility must lie in the nature of the object.) A new possibility cannot subsequently be found. The projecting of the understanding has its own possibility—that of developing itself. This development of the understanding we call “interpretation.” In interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself. Such interpretation is grounded existentially in understanding; the latter does not arise from the former. Nor is interpretation the acquiring of information about what is understood; it is rather the working-out of possibilities projected in understanding.
Objects form the substance of the world. The substance of the world can only determine a form and not any material properties. For these are first presented by the propositions—first formed by the configuration of the objects. Roughly speaking: objects are colourless. Thus the ontological grounds for defining the `world' as res extensa have been made plain: they lie in the idea of substantiality, which not only remains unclarified in the meaning of it Being, but gets passed off as something incapable of clarification, and gets represented indirectly by way of whatever substantial property belongs most pre-eminently to the particular substance. Substance is what exists independently of what is the case.
If I wrote a book “The world as I found it”, I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made. Such a description is always confined to entities. It is ontical. But what we are seeking is Being. The subject does not belong to the world but is a limit of the world. Only in some definite mode of its own Being-in-the-world can Dasein discover entities as Nature. This manner of knowing them has the character of depriving the world of its worldhood in a definite way. We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one's own. Thus, by its very nature, idle talk is a closing-off, since to go back to the ground of what is talked about is something which it leaves undone. The way in which things have been interpreted in idle talk has already established itself in Dasein. He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
