Publisher's Synopsis
Nearly all the lectures constituting this volume deal with the physiological or psychological side of physical questions; four treat the methods and development of science, briefly outlining a theory of cognition.Science, according to Prof. Mach, is essentially an economy of thought. Rooted in the most primitive psychical functions of life, this economy reaches its highest perfection in language and mathematics. Here, in the psychological origin and nature of our ideas, the elucidative power of the principle is obvious.Natural law is a rule or body of directions for the mental reconstruction of facts; enabling us to anticipate and retrace in thought the steps of nature. To this end, it embraces only certain aspects of the facts, such as are determinative. By means of these determinative elements and their formal constituents, we complete in thought facts that are only partly given; derive complete results from incomplete data. To reach the ungiven elements we should, on the primitive plan, have to resort to slow and tedious experience; that infinite pains we save ourselves by economical natural laws. This is all that science accomplishes. Its individual results we could reach in a sufficiently long time directly and without methods
