Herbart. 



204 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



physicians. It allied itself with the political tendencies 

 of the Eestoration. 



These three distinct ways of approaching the pheno- 

 mena of the inner world, i.e., the life of the soul, came 

 together in Germany and asserted themselves with equal 

 strength about the fourth decade of the century, when 

 after the death of Hegel the exclusive dominion of the 

 metaphysical method began to be attacked. The most 

 powerful and persistent opposition was carried on by 

 12 Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841). But, although 

 Herbart through his psychological writings did probably 

 more than any other German philosopher of that period 

 to counteract the one-sided idealism which then ruled 

 supreme, he did not break with the metaphysical method : 

 he still put into the foreground of his psychology defini- 

 tions regarding the nature and the location of the soul. 

 Inasmuch, however, as his psychological interest was 

 primarily educational, and as in his early practical 

 experience he had come in contact with the realistic 

 tendencies of that great school of educationalists which 

 was headed by Pestalozzi, he imported into his meta- 

 physics a much greater knowledge and appreciation of 

 actual realities than was to be found among his opponents. 

 Accordingly he calls his philosophy Realism, maintaining 

 that the main task of philosophy consists in a process 

 of elaborating consistent ideas out of the frequently in- 

 consistent and contradictory conceptions which are 

 furnished by experience and common-sense. Philosophy 

 was, so to speak, a clarifying process, the endeavour to 

 arrive at clear and consistent notions. In his text-book 

 of Psychology which was published in 1816, and still 



