Feuerbach’s anthropological standpoint will be discussed below.  Like Friedrich Ueberweg (1826-71; professor in Koenigsberg; System of Logic, 1857, 5th ed., edited by J.B.  Meyer, 1882—­English translation, 1871), Karl Fortlage was strongly influenced in his psychological views by Beneke.  Born in 1806 at Osnabrueck, and at his death in 1881 a professor in Jena, Fortlage shared with Beneke an impersonality of character, as well as the fate of meeting with less esteem from his contemporaries than he merited by the seriousness and originality of his thinking.  To his System of Psychology, 1855, in two volumes, he added, as it were, a third volume, his Contributions to Psychology, 1875, besides psychological lectures of a more popular cast (Eight Lectures, 1869, 2d ed., 1872; Four Lectures, 1874).[1] Fortlage characterizes his psychological method—­in the criticism of which F.A.  Lange fails to show the justice for which he is elsewhere to be commended—­as observation by the inner sense.  In the first place, consciousness, as the active form of representation, must be separated from that of which we are conscious, from the “content of representation,” which is in itself unconscious, but capable of coming into consciousness.  Next Fortlage seeks to determine the laws of these two factors.  In regard to the content of representation he distinguishes more sharply than Herbart between the fusibility of the homogeneous and the capacity for complex combination possessed by the heterogeneous (the fusion of similars goes on even without aid from consciousness, while the connection of dissimilars is brought about only through the help of the latter), and adds to these two general properties of the content of representation two further ones, its revivability (its persistence in unconsciousness), and its dissolubility in the scale of size, color, etc.  Consciousness, on the other hand, which for Fortlage coincides with the ego or self, is treated as the presupposition of all representations, not as their result—­it is underived activity.  He explains the nature of consciousness by the concept of attention, characterizes them both as “questioning activity” (Fragethaetigkeit), and follows them out in their various degrees from expectation through observation up to reflection.  The listening and watching of the hunter when waiting for the game is only a prolongation of the same consciousness which accompanies all less exciting representations.  The essential element in conscious or questioning activity is the oscillation between yes and no.

As soon as the disjunction is decided by a yes, the desire which lies at its basis, and which in the condition of consciousness is arrested, passes over into activity.  All consciousness is based on interest, and in its origin is “arrested impulse” (Triebhemmung).  “The direction of impulse to an intuition to be expected only in the future is called consciousness.”  The rank of a being depends on its capacity for reflection:  the greater the extent of its attention and the smaller the stimuli which suffice to rouse this to action, the higher it stands.  Impulse—­this is the fundamental idea of Fortlage’s psychology, like will with Fichte, and representation with Herbart—­consists of an element of representation and an element of feeling.