Just as associationism corresponds to the explanatory natural science of Galileo and Newton, the empirical psychology of the German enlightenment corresponds to the descriptive science of Linnæus and Buffon. But aside from a few exceptions, such as Tetens, its work must be regarded as a failure. To be sure, its intention is also to explain mental phenomena, to comprehend them first by careful introspection, and then to find by analysis the simplest faculties from which they have sprung. But its actual accomplishment does not go beyond a mere description of the occurrences offering themselves to first observation. And the results reached teach impressively that description is an unfruitful task unless, as sometimes of late, it is made to include also explanation. The numerous different expressions of mind, already distinguished by popular psychology, are only arranged in certain groups beside and above each other, and the explanation consists in presenting each expression as the effect of a special faculty. Thus we obtain a great multitude of complicated mental performances, inwardly related to each other, which are made to stand on a footing of equality and perfect independence, for example, perception, judgment, reason, imagination, and also abstraction, wit, symbolism, and so on. Like mere little _homunculi_ in the large _homo_, they act now in harmony, now in opposition. The poetic faculty, for example, “is a coöperation of imagination with judgment.” In connection with reason, imagination produces foresight. “Wit often does harm to judgment, and leads it to false verdicts.... Judgment must therefore be constantly on its guard against wit.” The advancement in this case did not result from a development of these views, but from their overthrow. But the opposition raised was turned also against associationism. Of the defects of associationism this is the greatest: it gives no explanation of the phenomenon of attention. The peculiar fact that of a great number of conscious impressions or ideas simultaneously offered to the mind, only a few can ever be carried through and become effective, is not to be explained on the basis of the associative connection of ideas. The associationists pass over this important fact either with complete silence or with a very insufficient treatment, and thus put a weapon into the hands of their opponents. The mind seems, in fact, in the case of attention to mock at all attempts at explanation and to prove itself, quite in the sense of the popular conception, a reality separable from its own contents--standing face to face with them, and treating them capriciously now in one way, now in another.