  Mach’s early intellectual development was very much a product of the outstanding developments in the sciences of his time. Whereas a generation before, there existed only one truly mature science, physics, by the early 1860s both psychology and biology had entered the scientific scene. Previously, scientifically based views on reality were essentially Newtonian-mechanistic. After Darwin and Fechner, the new sciences of psychology and evolutionary theory opened up new areas of philosophic-scientific interaction. The possibility of a new scientific view opened up, one based upon these new sciences, and sought to displace the Newtonian paradigm with one based upon developmental orientations.