These thoughts form a fragment of a Descriptive Psychology, which, as I now venture to hope, I may be enabled in the near future to publish in its complete form. In its wide divergence from all that has hitherto been put forward, and especially by reason of its being an essential stage in the further development of some of the views advocated in my _Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint_ it will be sufficiently evident that during the period of my long literary retirement I have not been idle. Specialists in philosophy will find also in this lecture what will be at once recognized as new. As regards the general reader, the rapidity with which I pass from one question to another might at first completely conceal many a sunken reef which required to be circumnavigated, many a precipice which had to be avoided. Surely I, if any one, have reason, owing to the conciseness of statement employed, to remember the saying of Leibnitz and pay little attention to refutation and much to demonstration. A glance at the notes--which, were they to do full justice to the subject, would need to be multiplied an hundredfold--will give him a further idea of those bye-paths which have misled so many, and prevented their finding an issue to the labyrinth. Meantime I would be well content--nay, I would regard it as the crown to all my efforts--should all that has been said appear so self-evident to him that he does not deem himself bound to thank me once in return. No one has determined the principles of ethics as, on the basis of new analyses, I have found it necessary to determine them, no one, especially among those who hold that in the foundation of those principles the feelings must find a place, have so radically and completely broken with the subjective view of ethics. I except only Herbart. But he lost himself in the sphere of aesthetic feeling, until at last we find him so far from the track that he, who in the theoretical philosophy is the irreconcilable enemy of contradiction, nevertheless in practical philosophy (i.e. ethics) tolerates it when his principles--the highest universally valid ideas--rush into conflict with one another. Still his teaching remains in a certain aspect truly related with mine, while, on other sides, other celebrated attempts to discover a basis for ethics find in it points of contact.