J. F. Herbart (1776-1841) occupies a peculiar position among German idealists. Like the others, he distinguishes between reality and appearance; and, like Schopenhauer in particular, he altogether rejects Hegel's identification of reality with reason. But, alone among post-Kantian metaphysicians, he is a pluralist. According to him, things-in-themselves, the eternal existents underlying all phenomena, are not one, but many. So far his philosophy is a return to the pre-Kantian system of Wolf and Leibniz; but whereas the monads of Leibniz were credited with an inward principle of evolution carrying them for ever onward through an infinite series of progressive changes, Herbart pushes his metaphysical logic to the length of denying all change and all movement to the eternal entities of which reality is made up. Herbart is entitled to the credit--whatever it may be worth--of devising a system unlike every other in history; for while Hegel has a predecessor in Heracleitus, his rival combines the Eleatic immobilism with a pluralism that is all his own. It is not, however, on these paradoxes that his reputation rests, but on more solid services as a psychologist and an educationalist. Without any acquaintance, as would seem, with the work doing in Britain, Herbart discarded the old faculty psychology, conceiving mentality as made up {123} of "presentations," among which a constant competition for the field of consciousness is going on; and it is to this view that such terms as "inhibition" and "threshold of consciousness" are due. And the enormous prominence now given to the idea of value in ethics may be traced back to the teaching of a thinker whom he greatly influenced, F. E. Beneke (1798-1854). * * * * * {124} CHAPTER V. THE HUMANISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The philosophical movement of the nineteenth century, after the collapse of German idealism, has not been dominated by any single master or any single direction to anything like the same extent as its predecessors. But if we are called on to select the dominant note by which all its products have been more or less coloured and characterised, none more impressive than the note of Humanism can be named. As applied to the culture of the Renaissance, humanism meant a tendency to concentrate interest on this world rather than on the next, using classic literature as the best means of understanding what man had been and again might be. At the period on which we are entering human interests again become ascendant; but they assume the widest possible range, claiming for their dominion the whole of experience--all that has ever been done or known or imagined or dreamed or felt. Hegel's inventory, in a sense, embraced all this; but Hegel had a way of packing his trunk that sometimes crushed the contents out of recognition, and a way of opening it that few could understand. Besides, much was left out of the trunk that could ill be spared by mankind.