With the exception of grammar, the above-mentioned scholarly disciplines do not generally formulate strictly valid laws. The rules of grammar are set down by human will, even if they are not conceived with conscious intention according to a considered plan; instead, they evolved gradually, as they were needed. Yet they appear to those who learn languages as commandments, laws imposed by an external authority.
Theology and jurisprudence are connected to historical and philological studies. The general rules we find in both of these fields are also commandments, laws which an external authority sets for belief and conduct in a moral and legal sense. They are not laws which, like the laws of nature, are generalizations based upon a wealth of facts. But, as with the application of a law of nature to an individual case, when something is subsumed under the commandments of grammar, law, morals, or dogma it takes the form of a conscious logical inference. The commandment forms the major premise of such an inference; the minor premise must ascertain if the case at hand contains the conditions for which the commandment is given. The solution of this will once again be a matter of psychological insight in most cases, in grammatical analysis (which should make clear the meaning of a sentence) as well as in legal judgment (concerning the credibility of the facts, or the intentions of a person, or the exact meaning of a written note).
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The natural sciences are the opposite extreme from the philological and historical disciplines in terms of their kind of intellectual work. It is not as if, in many areas of the natural sciences, an instinctive feel for analogies and a certain artistic tact do not have roles to play. On the contrary, in natural history one essentially relies on just those sort of abilities in order to determine which characteristics of species are important for classification, and which are unimportant, which sectors of the animal and plant kingdom are closer to the natural state than others – things which cannot be decided by a clearly definable rule. It is also significant that an artist, namely Goethe, initiated and essentially anticipated the further direction of comparative anatomical investigation by means of his analogy of the corresponding organs of different animals and his analogical theory of plant metamorphosis. But even in those disciplines where we work with the least understood life processes, it is for the most part much easier to formulate general concepts and theorems and to express them clearly than is the case when our judgment must base itself on an analysis of mental activities [Seelenthätigkeiten]. The especially scientific character of the natural sciences is seen in its full measure in those disciplines oriented toward experiments and mathematics, in pure mathematics most of all.
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