itting
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."

The