If all consciousness is subject to essential laws in a manner similar to that in which spatial reality is subject to mathematical laws, then these essential laws will be of most fertile significance in investigating facts of the conscious life of human and brute animals.

He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic. Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (German: [ˈhʊsɐl]; April 8 1859 – April 26 1938) was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology.