Semper's practical aesthetics involved several methodological steps. If the theory of formal beauty explained the ‘intrinsic coefficients’ of art, and the formula for style explained their modification by particular historical conditions, one step was still missing: a way to understand the correspondence between style and society as it unfolds through history. Missing, in other words, was an overall matrix in which individual historical moments could be coordinated into a comprehensive system of world history. If this could be achieved, it would be possible to explain the correspondence between artistic form and social-material conditions throughout history – for the first time establishing a complete and systematic science of the origin and development of art.

Looking for precedents for this ambitious project, Semper found contemporary human sciences in a deplorable state. In his view, the lack of proper methodology had made the study of man a “chaos of facts and experiences” accumulated “without coherence or principles”. To counter this confusion, Semper sought a method that could “find again those connections between the things, and … transform into an organic system of comparison what was before only an exterior and more or less arbitrary system of coordination and of exterior order.” Such a move from an ‘analytic’ to a ‘synthetic’ science, he argued, had already been achieved in a few other disciplines: