Although the philosophers of the seventeenth century rejected the Aristotelian theory of the soul as the substantial form of the body, they did not always deviate from the Aristotelian conception of physics as the science of nature in general, including the human mind. The equation of natural science with antimetaphysical, quantitative experimentation is problematic on two counts. As an approach to history, it partakes of the worst failings of “presentism”; it ignores the self-understanding of earlier figures who considered themselves practitioners of natural science. Philosophically, it makes a crude positivist assumption that all progress in science is progress in the quantitative description of natural phenomena. This philosophical position should be resisted: not all natural scientific achievements are fundamentally quantitative, including achievements in two sciences that are closely related to psychology, namely, physiology and biology.
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