[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