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 Vortraege_, 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