  It is worth emphasizing that Weyl’s approach to differential  geometry, in which the affine, projective and conformal structures  are treated in their own right rather than as mere aspects of the  metric, was instrumental for his discovery of the non-circular and  non-conventional geodesic method for the empirical determination of  the spacetimet metric. The old notion of a ‘geodesic  path’ had its inception in the context of classical  metrical geometry and ‘geodesicity’ was  characterized in terms of extremal paths of curves, which  presupposed a metric. It was Weyl’s metric-independent construction  of the symmetric linear connection that led him to introduce the  geometry of paths and the metric-independent characterization of a  geodesic path in terms of the process of autoparallelism of  its tangent direction. 