Chapter XIV (1)

THE OPPOSITION TO CONSTRUCTIVE IDEALISM: FRIES, HERBART, SCHOPENHAUER.

In Fries, Herbart, and Schopenhauer a threefold opposition was raised against the idealistic school represented by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The opposition of Fries is aimed at the method of the constructive philosophers, that of Herbart against their ontological positions, and that of Schopenhauer against their estimate of the value of existence. Fries and Beneke declare that a speculative knowledge of the suprasensible is impossible, and seek to base philosophy on empirical psychology; to the monism (panlogism) of the idealists Herbart opposes a pluralism, to their philosophy of becoming, a philosophy of being; Schopenhauer rejects their optimism, denying rationality to the world and the world-ground. Among themselves the thinkers of the opposition have little more in common than their claim to a better understanding of the Kantian philosophy, and a development of it more in harmony with the meaning of its author, than it had experienced at the hands of the idealists. Whoever fails to agree with them in this, and ascribes to the idealists whom they oppose better grounded claims to the honor of being correct interpreters and consistent developers of Kantian principles, will be ready to adopt the name _Semi-Kantians_, given by Fortlage to the members of the opposition,--a title which seems the more fitting since each of them appropriates only a definitely determinable part of Kant's views, and mingles a foreign element with it. In Fries this non-Kantian element comes from Jacobi's philosophy of faith; in Herbart it comes from the monadology of Leibnitz, and the ancient Eleatico-atomistic doctrine; in Schopenhauer, from the religion of India and (as in Beneke) from the sensationalism of the English and the French. We can only hint in passing at the parallelism which exists between the chief representatives of the idealistic school and the leaders of the opposition. Fries's theory of knowledge and faith is the empirical counterpart of Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Schopenhauer, in his doctrine of Will and Idea, in his vigorously intuitive and highly fanciful view of nature and art, and, in general, in his aesthetical mode of philosophizing, with its glad escape from the fetters of method, has so much in common with Schelling that many unhesitatingly treat his system as an offshoot of the Philosophy of Nature. The contrast between Herbart and Hegel is the more pronounced since they are at one in their confidence in the power of the concept. The most conspicuous point of comparison between the metaphysics of the two thinkers is the significance ascribed by them to the contradiction as the operative moment in the movement of philosophical thought. The attitude of hostility which Schleiermacher assumed in relation to Hegel's intellectualistic conception of religion induced Harms to give to Schleiermacher also a place in the ranks of the opposition. Following the chronological order, we begin with the campaign opened by Fries under the banner of anthropology against the main branch of the Kantian school.

%1. The Psychologists: Fries and Beneke.%

Jacob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843) was born and reared at Barby, studied at Jena, and habilitated at the same university in the year 1801; he was professor at Heidelberg in 1806-16, and at Jena from 1816 until his death. His chief work was the _New Critique of Reason_, in three volumes, 1807 (2d ed., 1828 _seq_.), which had been preceded, in 1805, by the treatise _Knowledge, Faith, and Presentiment_. Besides these he composed a _Handbook of Psychical Anthropology_, 1821 (2d ed., 1837 _seq_.), text-books of Logic, Metaphysics, the Mathematical Philosophy of Nature, and Practical Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion, and a philosophical novel, _Julius and Evagoras, or the Beauty of the Soul_.

Fries adopts and popularizes Kant's results, while he rejects Kant's method. With Reinhold and Fichte, he thinks "transcendental prejudice" has forced its way into philosophy, a phase of thought for which Kant himself was responsible by his anxiety to demonstrate everything. That _a priori_ forms of knowledge exist cannot be proved by speculation, but only by empirical methods, and discovered by inner observation; they are given facts of reason, of which we become conscious by reflection or psychological analysis. The _a priori_ element cannot be demonstrated nor deduced, but only shown actually present. The question at issue[1] between Fries and the idealistic school therefore becomes, Is the discovery of the _a priori_ element itself a cognition _a priori_ or _a posteriori_? Is the criticism of reason a metaphysical or an empirical, that is, an anthropological inquiry? Herbart decides with the idealists: "All concepts through which we think our faculty of knowledge are themselves metaphysical concepts" (_Lehrbuch zur Einleitung_, p. 231). Fries decides: The criticism of reason is an empirico-psychological inquiry, as in general empirical psychology forms the basis of all philosophy.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Kuno Fischer's Pro-Rectoral Address, _Die beiden Kantischen Schulen in Jena_, 1862.]

With the exception of this divergence in method Fries accepts Kant's results almost unchanged, unless we must call the leveling down which they suffer at his hands a considerable alteration. Only the doctrine of the Ideas and of the knowledge of reason is transformed by the introduction and systematization of Jacobi's principle of the immediate evidence of faith. Reason, the faculty of Ideas, _i.e._, of the indemonstrable yet indubitable principles, is fully the peer of the sensibility and the understanding. The same subjective necessity which guarantees to us the objective reality of the intuitions and the categories accompanies the Ideas as well; the faith which reveals to us the _per se_ of things is no less certain than the knowledge of phenomena. The ideal view of the world is just as necessary as the natural view; through the former we cognize the same world as through the latter, only after a higher order; both spring from reason or the unity of transcendental apperception, only that in the natural view we are conscious of the fact, from which we abstract in the ideal view, that this is the condition of experience. That which necessitates us to rise from knowledge to faith is the circumstance that the empty unity-form of reason is never completely filled by sensuous cognition. The Ideas are of two kinds: the aesthetic Ideas are intuitions, which lack clear concepts corresponding to them; the logical Ideas are concepts under which no correspondent definite intuitions can be subsumed. The former are reached through combination; the latter by negation, by thinking away the limitations of empirical cognition, by removing the limits from the concepts of the understanding. By way of the negation of all limitations we reach as many Ideas as there are categories, that is, twelve, among which the Ideas of relation are the most important. These are the three axioms of faith--the eternity of the soul (its elevation above space and time, to be carefully distinguished from immortality, or its permanence in time), the freedom of the will, and the Deity. Every Idea expresses something absolute, unconditioned, perfect, and eternal.--The dualism of knowledge and faith, of nature and freedom, or of phenomenal reality and true, higher reality, is bridged over by a third and intermediate mode of apprehension, feeling or presentiment, which teaches us the reconciliation of the two realities, the union of the Idea and the phenomenon, the interpenetration of the eternal and the temporal. The beautiful is the Idea as it manifests itself in the phenomenon, or the phenomenon as it symbolizes the eternal. The aesthetico-religious judgment looks on the finite as the revelation and symbol of the infinite. In brief, "Of phenomena we have knowledge; in the true nature of things we believe; presentiment enables us to cognize the latter in the former."

Theoretical philosophy is divided into the philosophy of nature, which is to use the mathematical method, hence to give a purely mechanical explanation of all external phenomena, including those of organic life, and to leave the consideration of the world as a teleological realm to religious presentiment--and psychology. The object of the former is external nature, that of the latter internal nature. I know myself only as phenomenon, my body through outer, my ego through inner, experience. It is only a variant mode of appearing on the part of one and the same reality--so Fries remarks in opposition to the _influxus physicus_ and the _harmonia praestabilata_--which now shows me my person inwardly as my spirit, and now outwardly as the life-process of my body. Practical philosophy includes ethics, the philosophy of religion, and aesthetics. In accordance with the threefold interest of our animal, sensuo-rational, and purely rational impulses, there result three ideals for the legislation of values. These are the ideal of happiness, the ideal of perfection, and the ideal of morality, or of the agreeable, the useful, and the good, the third of which alone possesses an unconditioned worth and validity as a universal and necessary law. The moral laws are deduced from faith in the equal personal dignity of men, and the ennobling of humanity set up as the highest mission of morality. The three fundamental aesthetical tempers are the idyllic and epic of enthusiasm, the dramatic of resignation, the lyric of devotion.

Fries's system is thus a union of Kantian positions with elements from Jacobi, in which the former experience deterioration, and the latter improvement, namely, more exact formulation. Among his adherents, and he has them still, the following appear deserving of mention: the botanists Schleiden and Hallier; the theologian De Wette; the philosophers Calker (of Bonn, died 1870) and Apelt (1812-59). The last made himself favorably known by his _Epochs of the History of Humanity_, 1845-46, _Theory of Induction_, 1854, and _Metaphysics_, 1857; his _Philosophy of Religion_ (1860) did not appear until after his death. The Catholic theologian, Georg Hermes of Bonn (1775-1831) favored a Kantianism akin to that of Fries.

* * * * *

The psychological view founded by Fries was consistently developed by Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798-1854). With the exception of three years of teaching in Göttingen, 1824-27, whither he had gone in consequence of a prohibition of his lectures called forth by his _Foundation of the Physics of Ethics_, 1822, he was a member of the university of his native city, Berlin, first as _Docent_, and, from 1832, after the death of Hegel, who was unfavorably disposed toward him, as professor extraordinary.[1] Besides Kant, Jacobi, and Fries, Schleiermacher, Herbart (with whom he became acquainted in 1821), and the English thinkers exerted a determining influence on the formation of his philosophy. Beneke denies the possibility of speculative knowledge even more emphatically than Fries. Kant's undertaking was aimed at the destruction of a non-experiential science from concepts, and if it has not succeeded in preventing the neo-Scholasticism of the Fichtean school, with its overdrawn attempts to revive a deductive knowledge of the absolute, this has been chiefly due to the false, non-empirical method of the great critic of reason. The root and basis of all knowledge is experience; metaphysics itself is an empirical science, it is the last in the series of philosophical disciplines. Whoever begins with metaphysics, instead of ending with it, begins the house at the roof. The point of departure for all cognition is inner experience or self-observation; hence the fundamental science is psychology, and all other branches of philosophy nothing but applied psychology. By the inner sense we perceive our ego as it really is, not merely as it appears to us; the only object whose _per se_ we immediately know is our own soul; in self-consciousness being and representation are one. Thus, in opposition to Kant, Beneke stands on the side of Descartes: The soul is better known to us than the external world, to which we only transfer the existence immediately given in the soul as a result of instinctive analogical inference, so that in the descent of our knowledge from men organized like ourselves to inorganic matter the inadequacy of our representations progressively increases.

[Footnote 1: On Beneke's character cf. the fourth of Fortlage's _Acht psychologische Vorträge_, which are well worth reading.]

Psychology--we may mention of Beneke's works in this field the _Psychological Sketches_, 1825-27, and the _Text-book of Psychology_, 1833, the third and fourth (1877) editions of which, edited by Dressler, contain as an appendix a chronological table of all Beneke's works--must, as internal natural science, follow the same method, and, starting with the immediately given, employ the same instruments in the treatment of experience as external natural science, _i.e._ the explanation of facts by laws, and, further still, by hypotheses and theories. Gratefully recognizing the removal of two obstacles to psychology, the doctrine of innate ideas and the traditional theory of the faculties of the soul by Locke and Herbart, (the commonly accepted faculties--memory, understanding, feeling, will--are in fact not simple powers, but mere abstractions, hypostatized class concepts of extremely complex phenomena,) Beneke seeks to discover the simple elements from which all mental life is compounded. He finds these in the numerous elementary faculties of receiving and appropriating external stimuli, which the soul in part possesses, in part acquires in the course of its life, and which constitute its substance; each separate sense of itself includes many such faculties. Every act or product of the soul is the result of two mutually dependent factors: _stimulus and receptivity_. Their coming together gives the first of the _four fundamental processes_, that of perception. The second is the constant addition of new elementary faculties. By the third, the equilibration or reciprocal transfer of the movable elements in representations, Beneke explains the reproduction of an idea through another associated with it, and the widening of the mental horizon by emotion, _e.g._, the astounding eloquence of the angry. Since each representation which passes out of consciousness continues to exist in the soul as an unconscious product (where we cannot tell; the soul is not in space), it is not retention, but obliviscence which needs explanation. That which persists of the representation which is passing into unconsciousness, and which makes its reappearance in consciousness possible, is called a "trace" in reference to its departed cause, and a "disposition" (_Angelegtheit_) in reference to its future results. Every such trace or germ (_Anlage_)--that which lies intermediate between perception and recollection--is a force, a striving, a tendency. The fourth of the fundamental processes (which may be traced downward into the material world, since the corporeal and the psychical differ only in degree and pass over into each other) is the combination of mental products according to the measure of their similarity, as these come to light in the formation of judgments, comparisons, witticisms, of collective images, collective feelings, and collective desires. The innate differences among men depend on the greater or lesser "powerfulness, vivacity, and receptivity" of their elementary faculties; all further differences arise gradually and are due to the external stimuli; even the distinction between the human and the animal soul, which consists in the spiritual nature of the former, is not original.

Of the five constructive forms of the soul, which result from the varying relation between stimulus and faculty, four are emotional products or products of moods. If the stimulus is too small pain (dissatisfaction, longing) arises, while pleasure springs from a marked, but not too great, fullness of stimulus. If the stimulus gradually increases to the point of excess, blunted appetite and satiety come in; when the excess is sudden it results in pain. A clear representation, a sensation arises when the stimulus is exactly proportioned to the faculty; it is in this case only that the soul assumes a theoretical attitude, that it merely perceives without any admixture of agreeable or disagreeable feelings. Desire is pleasure remembered, the ego the complex of all the representations which have ever arisen in the soul, the totality of the manifold given within me. For the immortality of the immaterial soul Beneke advances an original and attractive argument based on the principle that, in consequence of the constantly increasing traces, through which the substance of the soul is continually growing, consciousness turns more and more from the outer to the inner, until finally perception dies entirely away. At death the connection with the outer world ceases, it is true, but not the inner being of the soul, for which that which has hitherto been highest now becomes the foundation for new and still higher developments.

Like Herbart, on whom he was in many ways dependent, Beneke discussed psychology and pedagogics with greater success than logic, metaphysics, practical philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. He combats the apriorism of Kant in ethics as elsewhere. The moral law does not arise until the end of a long development. First in order are the immediately felt values of things, which we estimate according to the degree of enhancement or depression in the psychical state which they call forth. From the feelings are formed concepts, from concepts judgments; and the abstraction of the categorical imperative is a highly derivative phenomenon and a very late result, although the feeling of oughtness or of moral obligation, which accompanies the correct estimation of values and bids us prefer spiritual to sensuous delights and the general good to our own welfare, grows necessarily out of the inner nature of the human soul. There are two sources of religion: one theoretical, for the idea of God; the other practical, for the worship of God. We are impelled to the assumption of a suprasensible, an unconditioned, a providence, on the one hand, by the desire for a unitary conclusion for our fragmentary knowledge of the world; and, on the other, by moral need, by our unsatisfied longing after the good. The attributes which we ascribe to God are taken from experience, the abstract attributes from being in general, the naturalistic from the world, the spiritual from man. As an inevitable outcome of the transformation of religious feelings into representations, and one which is harmless because of the unmistakableness of their symbolic character, the anthropomorphic predicates, through which we think the Deity as personal, themselves establish the superiority of theism over pantheism. The object of religion, moreover, is accessible only to the subjective certitude of feeling which is given by faith, and not to scientific knowledge.

Feuerbach's anthropological standpoint will be discussed below. Like Friedrich Ueberweg (1826-71; professor in Königsberg; _System of Logic_, 1857, 5th ed., edited by J.B. Meyer, 1882--English translation, 1871), Karl Fortlage was strongly influenced in his psychological views by Beneke. Born in 1806 at Osnabrück, and at his death in 1881 a professor in Jena, Fortlage shared with Beneke an impersonality of character, as well as the fate of meeting with less esteem from his contemporaries than he merited by the seriousness and originality of his thinking. To his _System of Psychology_, 1855, in two volumes, he added, as it were, a third volume, his _Contributions to Psychology_, 1875, besides psychological lectures of a more popular cast (_Eight Lectures_, 1869, 2d ed., 1872; _Four Lectures_, 1874).[1] Fortlage characterizes his psychological method--in the criticism of which F.A. Lange fails to show the justice for which he is elsewhere to be commended--as observation by the inner sense. In the first place, consciousness, as the active form of representation, must be separated from that of which we are conscious, from the "content of representation," which is in itself unconscious, but capable of coming into consciousness. Next Fortlage seeks to determine the laws of these two factors. In regard to the content of representation he distinguishes more sharply than Herbart between the fusibility of the homogeneous and the capacity for complex combination possessed by the heterogeneous (the fusion of similars goes on even without aid from consciousness, while the connection of dissimilars is brought about only through the help of the latter), and adds to these two general properties of the content of representation two further ones, its revivability (its persistence in unconsciousness), and its dissolubility in the scale of size, color, etc. Consciousness, on the other hand, which for Fortlage coincides with the ego or self, is treated as the presupposition of all representations, not as their result--it is underived activity. He explains the nature of consciousness by the concept of attention, characterizes them both as "questioning activity" (_Fragethätigkeit_), and follows them out in their various degrees from expectation through observation up to reflection. The listening and watching of the hunter when waiting for the game is only a prolongation of the same consciousness which accompanies all less exciting representations. The essential element in conscious or questioning activity is the oscillation between yes and no.

As soon as the disjunction is decided by a yes, the desire which lies at its basis, and which in the condition of consciousness is arrested, passes over into activity. All consciousness is based on interest, and in its origin is "arrested impulse" (_Triebhemmung_). "The direction of impulse to an intuition to be expected only in the future is called consciousness." The rank of a being depends on its capacity for reflection: the greater the extent of its attention and the smaller the stimuli which suffice to rouse this to action, the higher it stands. Impulse--this is the fundamental idea of Fortlage's psychology, like will with Fichte, and representation with Herbart--consists of an element of representation and an element of feeling.

Pleasure + effort-image = impulse.

[Footnote 1: Among Fortlage's other works we may mention his valuable _History of Poetry_, 1839; the _Genetic History of Philosophy since Kant_, 1852; and the attractive _Six Philosophical Lectures_, 1869, 2d ed., 1872.]

In his metaphysical convictions, to which he gave expression in his _Exposition and Criticism of the Arguments for the Existence of God_, 1840, among other works, Fortlage belongs to the philosophers of identity. Originally sailing in Hegel's wake, he soon recognizes that the roots of the theory of identity go back to the Kantio-Fichtean philosophy, with which the system of absolute truth, as he holds, has come into being. He thus becomes an adherent of the Science of Knowledge, whose deductive results he finds inductively confirmed by psychological experience. Psychology is the empirical test for the metaphysical calculus of the Science of Knowledge. In regard to the absolute Fortlage is in agreement with Krause, the younger Fichte, Ulrici, etc., and calls his standpoint _transcendent pantheism_. According to this all that is good, exalted, and valuable in the world is divine in its nature; the human reason is of the same essence as the divine reason (there can be nothing higher than reason); the Godhead is the absolute ego of Fichte, which employs the empirical egos as organs, which thinks and wills in individuals, in so far as they think the truth and will the good, but at the same time as universal subject goes beyond them. If, after the example of Hegel, we give up transcendent pantheism in favor of immanence, two unphilosophical modes of representing the absolute at once result--on the one hand, materialism; on the other, popular, unphilosophical theism. If the Fichtean Science of Knowledge could be separated from its difficult method, which it is impossible ever to make comprehensible to the unphilosophical mind, it would be called to take the place of religion.[1]

[Footnote 1: Among Fortlage's posthumous manuscripts was one on the Philosophy of Religion, on which Eucken published an essay in the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie_, vol. lxxxii. 1883, p. 180 _seq_. after Lipsius had given a single chapter from it--"The Ideal of Morality according to Christianity"--in his _Jahrbücher für protestantische Theologie_ (vol. ix. pp. 1-45). The journals _Im Neuen Reich_, 1881, No. 24, and _Die Gegenwart_, 1882, No. 34, contained warmly written notices of Fortlage by J. Volkelt. Leopold Schmid (in Giessen, died 1869) gives a favorable and skillfully composed outline of Fortlage's system in his _Grundzüge der Einleitung in die Philosophie mit einer Beleuchtung der von K. Ph. Fischer, Sengler, und Fortlage ermöglichten Philosophie der That_, 1860, pp. 226-357. Cf. also Moritz Brasch, _K. Fortlage, Ein philosophisches Charakterbild_, in _Unsere Zeit_, 1883, Heft II, pp. 730-756, incorporated in the same author's _Philosophie der Gegenwart_, 1888.]

%2. Realism: Herbart.%

Johann Friedrich Herbart was scientifically the most important among the philosophers of the opposition. Herbart was born at Oldenburg in 1776, the son of a councilor of justice, and had already become acquainted with the systems of Wolff and Kant before he entered the University of Jena in 1794. In 1796 he handed in to his instructor Fichte a critique of two of Schelling's treatises, in which the youthful thinker already broke away from idealism. While a private tutor in Switzerland he made the acquaintance of Pestalozzi. In 1802 he habilitated in Göttingen, where, in 1805, he was promoted to a professorship extraordinary; while in 1809 he received the professorship in Königsberg once held by Kant, and later by W. Tr. Krug (died 1842). He died in 1841 at Göttingen, whither he had been recalled in 1833. His _Collected Works_ were published in twelve volumes, 1850-52 (reprinted 1883 _seq_.), by his pupil Hartenstein, who has also given an excellent exposition of his master's system in his _Probleme und Grundlehren der allgemeinen Metaphysik_, 1836, and his _Grundbegriffe der ethischen Wissenschaften_, 1844; a new edition, in chronological order, and under the editorship of K. Kehrbach, began to appear in 1882, or rather 1887, and has now advanced to the fourth volume, 1891. Herbart's chief works were written during his Königsberg residence: the _Text-book of Introduction to Philosophy_, 1813, 4th ed., 1837 (very valuable as an introduction to Herbartian modes of thought); _General Metaphysics_, 1829 (preceded in 1806 and 1808 by _The Principal Points in Metaphysics_, with a supplement, _The Principal Points in Logic); Text-book of Psychology_,[1] 1816, 2d ed., 1834; _On the Possibility and Necessity of applying Mathematics to Psychology_, 1822; _Psychology as a Science_, 1824-25. The two works on ethics, which were widely separated in time, were, on the other hand, written in Göttingen: _General Practical Philosophy_, 1808; _Analytical Examination of Natural Right and of Morals_, 1836. To these may be added a _Discourse on Evil_, 1817; _Letters on the Doctrine of the Freedom of the Human Will_, 1836; and the _Brief Encyclopaedia of Philosophy_, 1831, 2d ed., 1841. His works on education and instruction, whose influence and value perhaps exceed those of his philosophical achievements (collected editions of the pedagogical works have been prepared by O. Willmann, 1873-75, 2d ed., 1880; and by Bartholomaei), extended through his whole life. Besides pedagogics, psychology was the chief sphere of his services.

[Footnote 1: English translation by M.K. Smith, 1891.]

In antithesis to the philosophy of intuition with its imagined superiority to the standpoint of reflection, Herbart makes philosophy begin with attention to concepts, defining it as the elaboration of concepts. Philosophy, therefore, is not distinguished from other sciences by its object, but by its method, which again must adapt itself to the peculiarity of the object, to the starting point of the investigation in question--there is no universal philosophical method. There are as many divisions of philosophy as there are modes of elaborating concepts. The first requisite is the discrimination of concepts, both the discrimination of concepts from others and of the marks within each concept. This work of making concepts clear and distinct is the business of logic. With this discipline, in which Herbart essentially follows Kant, are associated two other forms of the elaboration of concepts, that of physical and that of aesthetic concepts. Both of these classes require more than a merely logical elucidation. The physical concepts, through which we apprehend the world and ourselves, contain contradictions and must be freed from them; their correction is the business of meta-physics. Metaphysics is the science of the comprehensibility of experience. The aesthetic (including the ethical) concepts are distinguished from the nature-concepts by a peculiar increment which they occasion in our representation, and which consists in a judgment of approval or disapproval. To clear up these concepts and to free them from false allied ideas is the task of aesthetics in its widest sense. This includes all concepts which are accompanied by a judgment of praise or blame; the most important among them are the ethical concepts. Thus, aside from logic, we reach two principal divisions of philosophy, which are elsewhere contrasted as theoretical and practical, but here in Herbart as metaphysics and aesthetics. Herbart maintains that these are entirely independent of each other, so that aesthetics, since it presupposes nothing of metaphysics, may be discussed before metaphysics, while the philosophy of nature and psychology depend throughout on ontological principles. Together with natural theology the two latter sciences constitute "applied" metaphysics. This in turn presupposes "general" metaphysics, which subdivides into four parts: Methodology, Ontology, Synechology, _i.e._, the theory of the continuous ([Greek: _suneches_]), which treats of the continua, space, time, and motion, and Eidolology, _i.e._, the theory of images or representations. The last forms the transition to psychology, while synechology forms the preparation for the philosophy of nature, whose most general problems it solves. Our exposition will not need to observe these divisions closely.

Metaphysics starts with the given, but cannot rest content with it, for it contains contradictions. In resolving these we rise above the given. What _is given_? Kant has not answered this question with entire correctness. We may, indeed, term the totality of the given "phenomena," but this presupposes something which appears. If nothing existed there would also nothing appear. As smoke points to fire, so appearance to being. So much seeming, so much indication of being. Things in themselves may be known mediately, though not immediately, by following out the indications of being contained by the given appearance. Further, not merely the unformed matter of cognition is given to us, but it is rather true that everything comes under this concept which experience so presses on us that we cannot resist it; hence not merely single sensations, but entire sensation-groups, not merely the matter, but also the forms of experience. If the latter were really subjective products, as Kant holds, it would necessarily be possible for us at will to think each perceptive-content either under the category of substance, or property, or cause--possible for us, if we chose, to see a round table quadrilateral. In reality we are bound in the application of these forms; they are given for each object in a definite way. The given forms--Herbart calls them experience-concepts--contain contradictions. How can these contradictions be removed? We may neither simply reject the concepts which are burdened with contradictions, for they are given, nor leave them as they are, for the logical _principium contradictionis_ requires that the contradiction as such be rooted out. The experience-concepts are valid (they find application in experience), but they are not thinkable. Therefore we must so transform and supplement them that they shall become free from contradictions and thinkable. The method which Herbart employs to remove the contradictions is as follows: The contradiction always consists in the fact that an _a_ should be the same as a _b_, but is not so. The desiderated likeness of the two is impossible so long as we think _a_ as _one_ thing. That which is unsuccessful in this case will succeed, perhaps, if in thought we break up the _a_ into several things--[Greek: _a b g_]. Then we shall be able to explain through the "together" (_Zusammen_) of this plurality what we were unable to explain from the undecomposed _a_, or from the single constituents of it. The "together" is a "relation" established by thought among the elements of the real. For this reason Herbart terms his method of finding out necessary supplements to the given "the method of relations." Another name for the same thing is "the method of contingent aspects." Mechanics operates with contingent aspects when, for the sake of explanation, it resolves a given motion into several components. Such fictions and substitutions--auxiliary concepts, which are not real, but which serve only as paths for thought--may be successfully employed by metaphysics also. The abstract expression of this method runs: The contradiction is to be removed by thinking one of its members as manifold rather than as one. In order to observe the workings of this Herbartian machine we shall go over the four principal contradictions by which his acuteness is put to the test--the problems of inherence, of change, of the continuous, of the ego.

We call the given sensation-complexes "things," and ascribe "properties" to them. How can one and the same thing have different properties--how can the one be at the same time many? To say that the thing "possesses" the properties does not help the matter. The possession of the different properties is itself just as manifold and various as the properties which are possessed. Hence the concept of the thing and its properties must be so transformed that the plurality which seems to be in the thing shall be transferred without it. Instead of one thing let us assume several, each with a single definite property, from whose "together" the appearance of many qualities in one thing now arises. The appearance of manifold properties in the one thing has its ground in the "together" of many things, each of which has one simple quality. Again, it is just as impossible for a thing to have different qualities in succession, or to change, as it is for it to have them at the same time. The popular view of change, which holds that a thing takes on different forms (ice, water, steam) and yet remains the same substance, is untenable. How is it possible to become another, and yet to remain the same? The universal feeling that the concept needs correction betrays itself in the fact that everyone involuntarily adds a cause to the change in thought, and seeks a cause for it, and thus of himself undertakes a transformation of the concept, though, it is true, an inadequate one. If we think this concept through we come upon a trilemma, a threefold impossibility. Whether we endeavor to deduce the change from external or from internal causes, or (with Hegel) to think it as causeless, in each case we involve ourselves in inconceivabilities. All three ideas--change as mechanism, as self-determination or freedom, as absolute becoming--are alike absurd. We can escape these contradictions only by the bold decision to conceive the quality of the existent as unchangeable. For the truly existent there is no change whatever. It remains, however, to explain the appearance of change, in which the wand of decomposition and the "together" again proves its magic power. Supported by the motley manifoldness of phenomena, we posit real beings as qualitatively different, and view this diversity as partial contraposition; we resolve, _e.g._, the simple quality _a_ into the elements _x_ + _z_, and a second quality _b_ into _y - z_. So long as the individual things remain by themselves, the opposition of the qualities will not make itself evident. But as soon as they come together, something takes place--now the opposites (+_z_ and -_z_) seek to destroy or at least to disturb each other. The reals defend themselves against the disturbance which would follow if the opposites could destroy each other, by each conserving its simple, unchangeable quality, _i.e._, by simply remaining self-identical. _Self-conservation against_ threatened _disturbances_ from without (it may be compared to resistance against pressure) is the only real change, and apparent change, the empirical changes of things, to be explained from this. That which changes is only the relations between the beings, as a thing maintains itself now against this and now against that other thing; the relations, however, and their change are something entirely contingent and indifferent to the existent. In itself the self-conservation of a real is as uniform as the quality which is conserved, but in virtue of the changing relations (the variety of the disturbing things) it can express itself for the observer in manifold ways as force. The real itself changes as little as a painting changes, for instance, when, seen near at hand, the figures in it are clearly distinguished, while for the distant observer, on the contrary, they run together into an indistinguishable chaos. Change has no meaning in the sphere of the existent.

Anyone who speaks thus has denied change, not deduced it. Among the many objections experienced by Herbart's endeavor to explain the empirical fact of change by his theory of self-conservation against threatened disturbances Lotze's is the most cogent: The unsuccessful attempt to solve the difficulties in the concept of becoming and action is still instructive, for it shows that they cannot be solved in this way--from the concept of inflexible being. If the "together," the threatened disturbance, and the reaction against the latter be taken as realities, then, in the affection by the disturber, the concept of change remains uneliminated and uncorrected; if they be taken as unreal concepts auxiliary to thought, change is relegated from the realm of being to the realm of seeming. Herbart gives to them a kind of semi-reality, less true than the unmoving ground of things (their unchangeable, permanent qualities), and more true than their contradictory exterior (the empirical appearance of change). Between being and seeming he thrusts in, as though between day and night, the twilight region of his "contingent aspects," with their relations, which are nothing to the real, their disturbances, which do not come to pass, and their self-conservations, which are nothing but undisturbed continuance in existence on the part of the real.

Besides the contradictions in the concepts of inherence, of change, and action and passion, it is the concept of being which prevents our philosopher from ascribing a living character to reality. Being, as Kant correctly perceived, contains nothing qualitative; it is absolute position. Whoever affirms that an object _is_, expresses thereby that the matter is to rest with the simple position; in which is included that it is nothing dependent, relative, or negative. (Every negation is something relative, relates to a precedent position, which is to be annulled by it.) Besides being, the existent contains something more--a quality; it consists of this absolute position and a _what_. If this _what_ is separated from being we reach an "image"; united with being it yields an essence or a real. This _what_ of things is not their sensuous qualities; the latter belong rather to the mere phenomenon. No one of them indicates what the object is by itself, when left alone. They depend on contingent circumstances, and apart from these they would not exist--what is color in the dark? what sound in airless space? what weight in empty space? what fusibility without fire?--they are each and all relative. Since being excludes negation of every kind, the quality of the existent must be absolutely _simple and unchangeable_; it brooks no manifoldness, no quantity, no distinctions in degree, no becoming; all this were a corruption of the purely affirmative or positive character of being. The existent is unextended and eternal. The Eleatics are to be praised because the need of escaping from the contradictions in the world of experience led them to make themselves masters of the concept of being without relation and without negation, and of the simple, homogeneous quality of the existent in its full purity. But while the Eleatics conceived the existent as one, the atomists made an advance by assuming a _plurality_ of reals. The truly one never becomes a plurality; plurality is given, hence an original plurality must be postulated. Herbart characterizes his own standpoint as qualitative atomism, since his reals are differentiated by their properties, not by quantitative relations (size and figure). The idealists and the pantheists make a false use of the tendency toward unity which, no doubt, is present in our reason, when they maintain that true being must be one. There is absolutely nothing in the concept of being to forbid us to think the existent as many; while the world of phenomena, with its many things and their many properties, gives irrefragable grounds which compel us to this conclusion. Hence, according to Herbart, the true reality is a (very large, though not, it is true, an infinite[1]) plurality of supra-sensible (non-spatial and non-temporal) reals, or, according to the Leibnitzian expression, monads, which all their life have nothing further to do than to preserve intact against disturbances the simple quality in which they consist (for the existent is not distinct from its quality; it does not have the quality, but is the quality). Each thing has but one response for the most varied influences: it answers all suggestions from without by affirming its _what_, by continually repeating, as it were, the same note, which gains a varying meaning only in so far as, in accordance with the character of the disturber, it appears now as a third, now as a fifth or seventh. This picture of the world is certainly not attractive; in it all change and becoming, all life and all activity is offered up on the altar of monotonous being. Happily Herbart is inconsistent enough to enliven this comfortless waste of changeless being by the relatively real or semi-real manifoldness of the self-conservations.

The infinite divisibility of space and of matter forms the chief difficulty in the problem of the continuous. Herbart endeavors to solve it by the assumption of an intelligible space with "fixed" lines (lines formed by a definite number of points, hence finitely divisible, and not continuous). Metaphysics demands the fixed or discrete line, although common thought is incapable of conceiving it. Space is a mere form of combination in representation or for the observer, and yet it is objective, _i.e._, it is valid for all intelligences, and not merely for human intelligence. From his complex and unproductive endeavors to derive the appearance of continuity from discontinuous reality we hurry on to the fourth, the psychological problem, which Herbart discusses with great acuteness. He considers it the chief merit of Fichte's Science of Knowledge that it called attention to this problem.

The concept of the ego, of whose reality we have so strong and immediate a conviction that, in the formula of asseveration, "as true as I exist," it is made the criterion of all other certitude, labors under various contradictions. Besides the familiar difficulty, here especially sensible, of one thing with many marks, it contains other absurdities of its own. In the ego or self-consciousness subject and object are to be identical. The identity of the representing and the represented ego is a self-contradictory idea, for the law of contradiction forbids the equation of opposites, while a subject is subject only through the fact that it is not object. But, again, self-consciousness can never be realized, because it involves a _regressus in infinitum_. The ego is defined as that which represents itself. What is this "self"? It is, in turn, the self-knower. This new explanation contains still a further self; which once more signifies the self-knower and so on to infinity. The ego represents the representation (_Vorstellen_) of its representation (_Vorstellen)_, etc. The representation (_Vorstellung_) of the ego, therefore, can never be actually brought to completion. (The assumption of the freedom of the will leads to an analogous _regressus in infinitum_, in which the question, "Willst thou thy volition?" "Willst thou the willing of this volition"? is repeated to infinity.) The only escape from this tissue of absurdities is to think the ego otherwise than is done by popular consciousness. The knowing and the known ego are by no means the same, but the observing subject in self-consciousness is one group of representations, the observed subject another. Thus, for example, newly formed representations are apperceived by the existing older ones, but the highest apperceiver is not, in turn, itself apperceived. The ego is not a unit being, which represents itself in the literal meaning of the phrase, but that which is represented is a plurality. The ego is the junction of numberless series of representations, and is constantly changing its place; it dwells now in this representation, now in that. But as we distinguish the point of meeting from the series which meet there, and imagine that it is possible simultaneously to abstract from all the represented series (whereas in fact we can only abstract from each one separately), there arises the appearance of a permanent ego as the unit subject of all our representations. In reality the ego is not the source of our representations, but the final result of their combination. The representation, not the ego, is the fundamental concept of psychology, the ego constituting rather its most difficult problem.[1] It is a "result of other representations, which, however, in order to yield this result, must be together in a single substance, and must interpenetrate one another" (_Text-book of Introduction_, p. 243). In this way Herbart defends the substantiality of the soul against Kant and Fries. The soul's immortality (as also its pre-existence) goes without saying, because of the non-temporal character of the real.

[Footnote 1: On the Herbartian psychology, cf. Ribot, _German Psychology of To-day_, English Translation by Baldwin, 1886, pp. 24-67; and G.F. Stout, _Mind_, vols. xiii.-xiv.--TR.]

The soul is one of these reals which, unchangeable in themselves, enter into various relations with others, and conserve themselves against the latter. In its simple _what_ as unknowable as the rest, it is yet familiar to us in its self-conservations. In the absence of a more fitting expression for the totality of psychical phenomena we call these _representations_, the phenomenal manifoldness of which is due to the variety of the disturbances and exists for the observer alone. In itself, without a plurality of dispositions and impulses, the soul is originally not a representative force, but first becomes such under certain circumstances, viz., when it is stimulated to self-conservation by other beings. The sum of the reals which stand in immediate relation to the soul is called its body; this, an aggregate of simple beings, furnishes the intermediate link of causal relation between the soul and the external world. The soul has its (movable) seat in the brain. In opposition to the physiological treatment of psychology, Herbart remarks that psychology throws much more light on physiology than she can ever receive from it.

The simplest representations are the sensations, which, amid all their variety, still group themselves into definite classes (odors, sounds, colors). They serve us as symbols of the disturbing reals, but they are not images of things, nor effects of these, but products of the soul itself: the generation of sensations is the soul's peculiar way of guarding itself against threatened disturbances. Every representation once come into being disappears again from consciousness, it is true, but not from the soul. It persists, unites with others, and stands with them in a relation of interaction--in both cases according to definite laws. These original representations are the only ones which the soul produces by its own activity; all other psychical phenomena, feeling, desire, will, attention, memory, judgment, the whole wealth of inner events, result of themselves from the interplay of the primary representations under law. Representation (more exactly sensation) is alone original; space, time, the categories, which Kant makes _a priori_, are all acquired, _i.e._, like all the higher mental life, they are the results of a psychical _mechanism_, results whose production needs no renewed exertion on the part of the soul itself. It has been a very harmful error in psychology hitherto to ascribe each particular mental activity to a special _faculty of the soul_ having a similar name, instead of deriving it from combinations of simple representations. Abstract, empty class ideas have been treated as real forces, in the belief that thus the single concrete acts had been "explained."

There is no bitterer foe of the faculty theory than Herbart. His campaign against it, if not victorious, was yet salutary, and the motives of his hostility, up to a certain point, entirely justified. Nothing is more useless than the assurance that what the soul actually does, that it must also have the power to do. Who disputes this? A faculty explains nothing so long as the laws under which its functions and its relations to other faculties remain unexplained. But although the faculty idea serves no positive end, it cannot be entirely discarded. It marks the boundary where our ability to reduce one class of psychical phenomena to another ceases. Herbart's polemic has no force against the moderate and necessary use of this idea, no matter how much it was in place in view of the impropriety of a superfluous multiplication of the faculties of the soul. The realization of the ideal of psychology, the reduction of the complex phenomena of mental life to the smallest possible number of simple elements, is limited by the heterogeneity of the original phenomena, knowing, feeling, willing, which wholly resists derivation from the combination of sensations. That which blinded Herbart to these limitations was that tendency toward unity, which, as a metaphysician and moral philosopher, he had all too willfully suppressed, and which now took revenge for this infringement of its rights by misleading the psychologist to an exaggeration which had important consequences. Nevertheless his unsuccessful attempt remains interesting and worthy of gratitude.

The discovery of the laws which govern the interaction of the psychical elements is the task of a _statics and a mechanics_ of representations. The former investigates the equilibrium or the settled final state; the latter, the change, _i.e._ the movements of representations. These names of themselves betray Herbart's conviction that mathematics can and must be applied to psychology. The bright hopes, however, which Herbart formed for the attempt at a mathematical psychology, were fulfilled neither in his own endeavors nor in those of his pupils, although, as Lotze remarks, it would be asserting too much to say that the most general formulas which he set up contradict experience.--The unity of the soul forces representations to act on one another. Disparate representations, those, that is, which belong to different representative series, as the visual image of a rose and the auditory image of the word rose, or as the sensations yellow, hard, round, ringing, connected in the concept gold piece, enter into complications [complexes]. Homogeneous representations (the memory image and the perceptual image of a black poodle) fuse into a single representation. Opposed representations (red and blue) arrest one another when they are in consciousness together. The connection and graded fusion of representations is the basis of their retention and reproduction, as well as of the formation of continuous series of representations. The reproduction is in part immediate, a free rising of the representation by its own power as soon as the hindrances give way; in part mediate, a coming up through the help of others. On the _arrest_ of partially or totally opposed representations Herbart bases his psychological calculus. Let there be given simultaneously in consciousness three opposed representations of different intensities, the strongest to be called _a_, the weakest _c_, the intermediate one _b_. What happens? They arrest one another, _i.e._ a part of each is forced to sink below the threshold of consciousness.[1]

What is the amount of the arrest? As much as all the weaker representations together come to--the sum of arrest or the sum of that which becomes unconscious (as it were the burden to be divided) is equal to the sum of all the representations with the exception of the strongest (hence = _b_ + _c_), and is divided among the individual representations in the inverse ratio of their strength, consequently in such a way that the strongest (the one which most actively and successfully resists arrest) has the least, and the weakest the most, of it to bear. It may thus come to pass that a representation is entirely driven out of consciousness by two stronger ones, while it is impossible for this to happen to it from a single one, no matter how superior it be. The simplest case of all is when two equally strong representations are present, in which case each is reduced to the half of its original intensity. The sum of that which remains in consciousness is always equal to the greatest representation.

[Footnote 1: By their mutual pressure representations are transformed into a mere _tendency_ to represent, which again becomes actual representation when the arrest ceases. The parts of a representation transformed into a tendency, and the residua remaining unobscured, are not pieces cut off, but the quantity denotes merely a degree of obscuration in the whole representation, or rather in the representation which actually takes place.]

As soon as a representation reaches the zero point of consciousness, or as soon as a new representation (sensation) comes in, the others begin at once to rise or sink. The Mechanics seeks to investigate the laws of these movements of representations; but we may the more readily pass over its complicated calculations since their precise formulas can never more than very roughly represent the true state of the case, which simply rebels against precision. The rock on which every immanent use of mathematics in psychology must strike, is the impossibility of exactly measuring one representation by another. We may, indeed, declare one stronger than another on the basis of the immediate impression of feeling, but we cannot say how much stronger it is, nor with reason assert that it is twice or half as intense. Herbart's mathematical psychology was wrecked by this insurmountable difficulty. The demand for exactness which it raised, but which it was unable to satisfy with the means at its disposal, has recently been renewed, and has led to assured results in psycho-physics, which works on a different basis and with ingenious methods of measurement.