When a geometer wishes to understand the form of a curve, he first resolves it into small rectilinear elements. In doing this, however, he is fully aware that these elements are only provisional and arbitrary devices for comprehending in parts what he cannot comprehend as a whole. When the law of the curve is found he no longer thinks of the elements. Similarly, it would not become physical science to see in its self-created, changeable, economical tools, molecules and atoms, realities behind phenomena, forgetful of the lately acquired sapience of her older sister, philosophy, in substituting a mechanical mythology for the old animistic or metaphysical scheme, and thus creating no end of suppositious problems. The atom must remain a tool for representing phenomena, like the functions of mathematics. Gradually, however, as the intellect, by contact with its subject-matter, grows in discipline, physical science will give up its mosaic play with stones and will seek out the boundaries and forms of the bed in which the living stream of phenomena flows. The goal which it has set itself is the simplest and most economical abstract expression of facts.
The question now remains, whether the same method of research which till now we have tacitly restricted to physics, is also applicable in the psychical domain. This question will appear superfluous to the physical inquirer. Our physical and psychical views spring in exactly the same manner from instinctive knowledge. We read the thoughts of men in their acts and facial expressions without knowing how. Just as we predict the behavior of a magnetic needle placed near a current by imagining Ampère's swimmer in the current, similarly we predict in thought the acts and behavior of men by assuming sensations, feelings, and wills similar to our own connected with their bodies. What we here instinctively perform would appear to us as one of the subtlest achievements of science, far outstripping in significance and ingenuity Ampère's rule of the swimmer, were it not that every child unconsciously accomplished it. The question simply is, therefore, to grasp scientifically, that is, by conceptional thought, what we are already familiar with from other sources. And here much is to be accomplished. A long sequence of facts is to be disclosed between the physics of expression and movement and feeling and thought.