No education without instruction, no instruction without education, is the keynote of the whole Herbartian pedagogy. From Locke down, the essential trend of educational reforms has been in the direction of exalting discipline and training, natural growth and experience, thrusting instruction into the background. Not knowledge, not intellect, but the virtues, character, will, heart, man himself, was the fundamental aim of education, and instruction was accounted as only contributing to it in a secondary or tertiary way. Herbart agreed with his predecessors in seeing the main purpose of education in the formation of character; but, according to him, instruction was the chief means for attaining this end, and consequently it was the essential business of educators. To him, “to present the whole treasure of accumulated research in a concentrated form to the youthful generation is the highest service which mankind at any period of his existence can render to his successors” (9: p. 81). And herein lies the inspiration of the teacher’s calling. However, he regained this importance for the function of instruction by giving it a higher meaning than the mere imparting of miscellaneous knowledge. In order to see this we must go a little into his psychology, upon which his pedagogy rests. The new departure which Herbart made in psychology was that he dispersed the ghost of “faculties,” which had been attributed to an entity called soul, and substituted in its place the manifold images or representations as the phenomena of our psychic life. He argues: “It is an error indeed to look upon the human soul as an aggregate of all sorts of faculties” (8: p. 15). And to reduce these to one and the same active principle is to make the theory still worse. “The soul is a simple essence, not merely without parts, but also without any kind of multiplicity in its quality” (11: p. 119). “The soul has no innate dispositions (_Anlage_), nor faculties (_Vermögen_) whatever, either for the purpose of receiving or for the purpose of producing. It is, therefore, no _tabula rasa_ in the sense that impressions foreign to itself may be made upon it; moreover, in the sense indicated by Leibnitz, it is not a substance which includes within itself original self-activity. It has originally neither concepts nor feelings nor desires. It knows nothing of itself and nothing of other things; also in it lie no forms of perception and thought, no laws of willing and action, and not even a remote predisposition to any of these” (11: p. 120). As to the metaphysical question, “What is the soul in its essence?” Herbart endeavors to give no answer. It “is totally unknown, and will forever remain so. It is as little an object of speculative as of empirical psychology” (11: p. 120).