[67] Especially in the open-minded and learned articles in the _Archiv für Philosophie_, 1907, Band xiv., Professor Stein (of Bern) is known as one of the most enthusiastic and voluminous writers upon Social Philosophy in Germany. His best-known work is an encyclopedic book upon the social question in the light of philosophy (_Die soziale Frage im Lichte der Philosophie_, 1903). His tendency here is realistic and naturalistic and evolutionistic, and he thinks (for a philosopher) far too much of men like Herbert Spencer and Mach and Ostwald. What one misses in Stein is a discussion of the social question in relation to some of the deeper problems of philosophy, such as we find in men of our own country like Mackenzie and Bosanquet, and Ritchie, and Jones, and others. His work, however (it has been translated into Russian and French), is a complete literary presentation of the subject, and a valuable source of information. See my review notices of it in the _Phil. Rev._ vol. xiv. [68] Mach and Ostwald both represent (for the purposes of our study) the association that undoubtedly exists between Pragmatism and the tendency of all the physical and natural sciences to form “hypotheses” or conceptions, that are to them the best means of “describing” or “explaining” (for any purpose) either facts, or the connexions between facts. Mach (professor of the history and theory of the sciences in Vienna) is a “phenomenalist” and “methodologist” who attacks all _a priorism_, treating the matter of the arrangement of the “material” of a science under the idea of the “most economic expenditure” of our “mental energy.” One of the best known of his books is his _Analysis of the Sensations_ (translated, along with his _Popular Science Lectures_, in the “Open Court Library” of Chicago). In this work he carries out the idea of his theory of knowledge as a question of the proper relation of “facts” to “symbols.” “Thing, body, matter,” he says (p. 6), “are all nothing apart from their so-called attributes.” “Man possesses in its highest form the power of consciously and arbitrarily determining his point of view.” In his _Introduction_, he attempts to show how “the ego and the relation of bodies to the ego give rise” to “problems” in the relations simply of “certain complexes” of “sensation to each other.” While it is undoubtedly to the credit of Mach that he sees the “subjective,” or the “mental,” factor in facts and things and objects, it must be said that he ignores altogether the philosophical problems of the ego, or the “self,” as something more than a mere object among objects.