ABSTRACT
The distinction which the Kantian Schiller, using the Kantian terminology, makes coincides with the distinction between hypothesis and fiction in the language of the methodologists. Goethe's animal archetype is a schematic fiction, whereas the Darwinian theory of evolution is a hypothesis. Only an adherence to the conditions can provide with a guarantee that the hypothesis has any claim to truth: for reality, and only reality, is the goal of all hypothetical assumptions. The idea of a reduction of matter to atoms is, then, a fiction. The idea of a reduction of the types of matter to a single primal substance is a plausible hypothesis. Natural and naive thought takes all concepts and methods of the subjective conceptual world to be representative of an exactly corresponding reality. The constitution of matter is one of the most important questions of science.
