say of an engineer who is studying a blueprint of a machine that he is studying a blueprint and not a machi~ie, or of an anatomist studying an atlas that he studies a drawing and not the human skeleton. For concepts as well are no more than blueprints, snapshots; schemas of reality and in studying them we study models of reality, just as we study a foreign country or city on the plan or geographical map.

When it comes to such well-developed sciences as physics and chemistry, Binswanger [1922, p. 4] himself is compelled to admit that a broad field of investigations developed in between the critical and empirical poles and that this area is called theoretical, or general, physics, chemistry, etc. He remarks that natural-scientific theoretical psychology, which in principle wishes to be like physics, acts likewise. However abstractly theoretical physics may formulate its subject of study, for example as “the theory of causal dependencies between natural phenomena,” it nevertheless studies real facts. General physics studies the concept of the physical phenomenon itself, of the physical causal link, but not the various laws and theories on the basis of which the real phenomena may be explained as physically causal. The subject matter of investigation of general physics is rather the physical explanation itself.

As we see, Binswanger himself admits that his conception of the general science diverges in one point from the actual conception as it is realized in a number of sciences. They are not differentiated by a greater or lesser degree of abstraction of the concepts—what can be further from the real, empirical things than causal dependency as the subject matter of a whole science?—but by theft ultimate focus:

general physics, in the end, focuses on real facts which it wishes to explain by means of abstract concepts. The general science is in principle not focused on real facts, but on the concepts themselves and has nothing to do with the real facts.

Admittedly, when a debate between theory and history arises, when there is a discrepancy between the idea and the fact, as in the present case, the debate is always solved in favor of history or fact. The argument from the facts may itself not always be appropriate in the area of fundamental research. Then to the reproach that the ideas and facts do not correspond we are fully justified to answer:

so much the worse for the facts. In the present case, so much the worse for the sciences when they find themselves in a phase of development in which they have not yet attained the stage of a general science. When a general science in this sense does not yet exist, it does not follow that it will never exist, that it should not exist, that we cannot and must not lay its foundations. We must therefore examine the essence, the logical basis of the problem, and then it will also become possible to clarify the meaning of the historical deviation of the general science from its abstract idea.

It is important to make two points.

1. Every natural-scientific concept, however high the degree of its abstraction from the empirical fact, always contains a clot, a sediment of the concrete, real and scientifically known reality, albeit in a very weak solution, i.e., to every ultimate concept, even to the most abstract, corresponds some aspect of reality which the concept represents in an abstract, isolated form. Even purely fictitious, not natural-scientific but mathematical concepts ultimately contain some echo, some reflection of the real relations between things and the real processes, although they did not develop from empirical, actual knowledge, but purely a priori, via the deductive path of speculative logical operations. As Engels demonstrated, even such an abstract concept as the series of numbers, or even such an obvious fiction as zero, i.e., the idea of the absence of any magnitude, is full of properties that are qualitative, i.e., in the end they correspond in a very remote and dissolved form to real, actual relations. Reality exists even in the imaginary abstractions of mathematics.