In fact, modern thought established a relation to the origin that was inverse for man and for things: in this way it sanctioned but outwitted in advance and preserved all its power of contestation with regard to them the positivist attempts to insert man's chronology within that of things, in such a way that the unity of time would be restored and that man's origin would be no more than a date, a fold, in the sequential series of beings (placing that origin, and with it the appearance of culture, the dawn of civilizations, within the stream of biological evolution); it sanctioned also the inverse and complementary endeavour to align the experience man has of things, the knowledge he has acquired of them, and the sciences he has thus been able to constitute, in accordance with chronology (so that though all man's beginnings have their locus within the time of things, his individual or cultural time makes it possible, in a psychological or historical genesis, to define the moment at which things meet the face of their truth for the first time); in each of these two alignments, the origin of things and the origin of man are subordinated to each other; but the mere fact that there are two possible and irreconcilable alignments indicates the fundamental asymmetry that characterizes modern thought on origin.