Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/532

 5IO BENEKE. 1832, after the death of Hegel, who was unfavorably dis* posed toward him, as professor extraordinary.* Besides Kant, Jacobi, and Fries, Schleiermacher, Herbart (with whom he became acquainted in 1821), and the English thinkers exerted a determining influence on the formation of his philosophy. Beneke denies the possibility of speculative knowledge even more emphatically than Fries. Kant's undertaking was aimed at the destruction of a non-experi- ential science from concepts, and if it has not succeeded in preventing the neo-Scholasticism of the Fichtean school, with its overdrawn attempts to revive a deductive knowl- edge of the absolute, this has been chiefly due to the false, non-empirical method of the great critic of reason. The root and basis of all knowledge is experience ; metaphysics itself is an empirical science, it is the last in the series of philosophical disciplines. Whoever begins with metaphysics, instead of ending with it, begins the house at the roof. The point of departure for all cognition is inner experience or self-obser- vation ; hence the fundamental science is psychology, and all other branches of philosophy nothing but applied psy- chology. By the inner sense we perceive our ego as it really is, not merely as it appears to us; the only object whose /^r se we immediately know is our own soul ; in self-conscious- ness being and representation are one. Thus, in opposition to Kant, Beneke stands on the side of Descartes : The soul is better known to us than the external world, to which we only transfer the existence immediately given in the soul as a result of instinctive analogical inference, so that in the descent of our knowledge from men organized like ourselves to inorganic matter the inadequacy of our representations progressively increases. Psychology — we may mention of Beneke's works in this field the Psychological Sketches, 1825-27, and the Text-book of Psychology, 1833, the third and fourth (1877) editions of which, edited by Dressier, contain as an appendix a chrono- logical table of all Beneke's works — must, as internal nat- ural science, follow the same method, and, starting with the immediately given, employ the same instruments in the Vortrdge, which are well worth reading.
 * On Beneke's character cf . the fourth of Fortlage's Acht psychologische