which exclusively emphasizes
the imperative or obligatory character of the good, is one-sided; it
considers morality only in arrest, a mistake which goes with its false
doctrine of freedom. On the other hand, it was a great merit in Kant
that he first made clear the unconditional validity of moral judgment,
independent of all eudemonism. Politics and pedagogics are branches of the
theory of virtue. The end of education is development in virtue, and, as
a means to this, the arousing of varied interests and the production of a
stable character.

In conclusion, we may sum up the points in which Herbart shows himself
a follower of Kant--he calls himself a "Kantian of the year 1828." His
practical philosophy takes from Kant its independence of theoretical
philosophy, the disinterested character of aesthetic judgment, the
absoluteness of ethical values, the non-empirical origin of the moral
concepts: "The fundamental ethical relations are not drawn from
experience." His metaphysics owes to Kant the critical treatment of the
experience-concepts (its task is to make experience comprehensible), in
which the leading idea in the Kantian doctrine of the antinomies, the
inevitableness of contradictions, is generalized, extended to all the
fundamental concepts of experience, and, as it were, transferred from the
Dialectic to the Analytic; it owes to him, further, the conception of being
as absolute position, and, finally, the dualism of phenomena and things
in themselves. Herbart (with Schopenhauer) considers the renewal of the
Platonic distinction between seeming and being the chief service of the
great critical philosopher, and finds his greatest mistake in the _a
priori_ character ascribed to the forms of cognition. In the doctrine of
the pure intuitions and the categories, and the Critique of Judgment, he
rejects, and with full consciousness, just those parts of Kant on which the
Fichtean school had built further. Finally, Herbart's method of thought,
his impersonality, the at times anxious caution of his inquiry, and the
neatness of his conceptions, are somewhat akin to Kant's, only that he
lacked the gift of combination to a much greater degree than his great
predecessor on the Koenigsberg rostrum. His remarkable acuteness is busier
in loosening than in binding; it is more happy in the discovery of
contradictions than in their resolution. Therefore he does not belong to
the kings who have decided the fate of philosophy for long