 The great hope of Fechner, like many other philosophers of his age (Trendelenburg, Lotze, Hartmann), was that the natural sciences could provide a worldview more reliable than the a priori methods of the old metaphysics. The old metaphysics here was not simply the rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff but the metaphysics of natural science of Kant, Schelling, Hegel and Herbart, which was still indebted to the old rationalism in its faith in pure reason. This new worldview would still be able to satisfy the interests of morality and religion; and it would disarm the threat of materialism, which regarded the old morality and religion as little more than superstition. 