[Footnote 1:  On Beneke’s character cf. the fourth of Fortlage’s Acht psychologische Vortraege, which are well worth reading.]

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 Dressler, contain as an appendix a chronological table of all Beneke’s works—­must, as internal natural science, follow the same method, and, starting with the immediately given, employ the same instruments in the treatment of experience as external natural science, i.e. the explanation of facts by laws, and, further still, by hypotheses and theories.  Gratefully recognizing the removal of two obstacles to psychology, the doctrine of innate ideas and the traditional theory of the faculties of the soul by Locke and Herbart, (the commonly accepted faculties—­memory, understanding, feeling, will—­are in fact not simple powers, but mere abstractions, hypostatized class concepts of extremely complex phenomena,) Beneke seeks to discover the simple elements from which all mental life is compounded.  He finds these in the numerous elementary faculties of receiving and appropriating external stimuli, which the soul in part possesses, in part acquires in the course of its life, and which constitute its substance; each separate sense of itself includes many such faculties.  Every act or product of the soul is the result of two mutually dependent factors:  stimulus and receptivity.  Their coming together gives the first of the four fundamental processes, that of perception.  The second is the constant addition of new elementary faculties.  By the third, the equilibration or reciprocal transfer of the movable elements in representations, Beneke explains the reproduction of an idea through another associated with it, and the widening of the mental horizon by emotion, e.g., the astounding eloquence of the angry.  Since each representation which passes out of consciousness continues to exist in the soul as an unconscious product (where we cannot tell; the soul is not in space), it is not retention, but obliviscence which needs explanation.  That which persists of the representation which is passing into unconsciousness, and which makes its reappearance in consciousness possible, is called a “trace” in reference to its departed cause, and a “disposition” (Angelegtheit) in reference to its future results.  Every such trace or germ (Anlage)—­that which lies intermediate between perception and recollection—­is a force, a striving, a tendency.  The fourth of the fundamental processes (which may be traced downward into the material world, since the corporeal and the psychical differ only in degree and pass over into each other) is the combination of mental products according to the measure of their similarity, as these come to light in the formation of judgments, comparisons, witticisms, of collective images, collective feelings, and collective desires.  The innate differences among men depend on the greater or lesser “powerfulness, vivacity, and receptivity” of their elementary faculties; all further differences arise gradually and are due to the external stimuli; even the distinction between the human and the animal soul, which consists in the spiritual nature of the former, is not original.