Fries’s system is thus a union of Kantian positions with elements from Jacobi, in which the former experience deterioration, and the latter improvement, namely, more exact formulation.  Among his adherents, and he has them still, the following appear deserving of mention:  the botanists Schleiden and Hallier; the theologian De Wette; the philosophers Calker (of Bonn, died 1870) and Apelt (1812-59).  The last made himself favorably known by his Epochs of the History of Humanity, 1845-46, Theory of Induction, 1854, and Metaphysics, 1857; his Philosophy of Religion (1860) did not appear until after his death.  The Catholic theologian, Georg Hermes of Bonn (1775-1831) favored a Kantianism akin to that of Fries.

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The psychological view founded by Fries was consistently developed by Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798-1854).  With the exception of three years of teaching in Goettingen, 1824-27, whither he had gone in consequence of a prohibition of his lectures called forth by his Foundation of the Physics of Ethics, 1822, he was a member of the university of his native city, Berlin, first as Docent, and, from 1832, after the death of Hegel, who was unfavorably disposed toward him, as professor extraordinary.[1] 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-experiential 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 knowledge 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-observation; hence the fundamental science is psychology, and all other branches of philosophy nothing but applied psychology.  By the inner sense we perceive our ego as it really is, not merely as it appears to us; the only object whose per se we immediately know is our own soul; in self-consciousness 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.