  These various influences are drawn together in the introductory chapters of PAO. Here, Vaihinger presents a view of the “psyche” as a purely natural faculty, akin to a bodily organ, and bound by the same laws as the rest of the organic world. All psychic activities, including “scientific thought,” are “to be considered from the point of view of an organic function” (PAO 1). Like bodily organs, the psyche is designed (or rather, selected) to perform a particular role within the total economy of the organism. Its purpose is “to change and elaborate the perceptual material into those ideas, associations of ideas, and conceptual constructs,” which produce “a world [in which] objective happenings can be calculated and our behavior successfully carried out in relation to phenomena”(PAO 2). Its purpose is therefore not “to be a copy [Abbild] of reality,” but rather “an instrument for finding our way about more easily in this world” (PAO 22, translation altered). Though broadly in the spirit of Schopenhauer and Darwin, this instrumentalist conception of the mind is, as Ceynowa has argued (1993, 35–132), also more specifically indebted to the nineteenth century psychologist Adolf Horwicz.