Ernst Mach’s works had a great influence on understanding the nature of cognition and forming non-classical space and time ideas. The article makes a special stress on the epistemological breakthrough based on Mach’s ideas: cognition subject from transcendental to natural world; empirical knowledge as a sum of natural and mental processes; relative nature of space and time that resulted in both Einstein’s theory of relativity and the relational concept of space and time being developed in science nowadays. Mach paid his attention mainly to the search of obvious ontological principles that resulted from experiments and could be taken as a basis to construct theories describing them. On the contrary, the modern epistemology considers the cognition process as the unity of subjectivity and objectivity. Thus, the categories of subject and object create an entity which elements acquire a meaning only in the interdependence on each other and the whole system. The author proves that Mach’s suggestion to consider the basic purpose of science as adapting an idea to experience gives a negative result due to the unilateral direction of the cognition process and the emergence of “model-dependent realism”. As for the methodology of his works, they were written from the position of dialectics because of Mach’s argument with Newton and Kant’s metaphysical approaches to prior and absolute categories. The author makes a conclusion that it was Mach who proposed the idea of subject and object’s unity in the form of their “principal coordination”. This approach forms the foundation of understanding the cognition process in the modern epistemology.

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