In antithesis to the philosophy of intuition with its imagined superiority to the standpoint of reflection, Herbart makes philosophy begin with attention to concepts, defining it as the elaboration of concepts.  Philosophy, therefore, is not distinguished from other sciences by its object, but by its method, which again must adapt itself to the peculiarity of the object, to the starting point of the investigation in question—­there is no universal philosophical method.  There are as many divisions of philosophy as there are modes of elaborating concepts.  The first requisite is the discrimination of concepts, both the discrimination of concepts from others and of the marks within each concept.  This work of making concepts clear and distinct is the business of logic.  With this discipline, in which Herbart essentially follows Kant, are associated two other forms of the elaboration of concepts, that of physical and that of aesthetic concepts.  Both of these classes require more than a merely logical elucidation.  The physical concepts, through which we apprehend the world and ourselves, contain contradictions and must be freed from them; their correction is the business of meta-physics.  Metaphysics is the science of the comprehensibility of experience.  The aesthetic (including the ethical) concepts are distinguished from the nature-concepts by a peculiar increment which they occasion in our representation, and which consists in a judgment of approval or disapproval.  To clear up these concepts and to free them from false allied ideas is the task of aesthetics in its widest sense.  This includes all concepts which are accompanied by a judgment of praise or blame; the most important among them are the ethical concepts.  Thus, aside from logic, we reach two principal divisions of philosophy, which are elsewhere contrasted as theoretical and practical, but here in Herbart as metaphysics and aesthetics.  Herbart maintains that these are entirely independent of each other, so that aesthetics, since it presupposes nothing of metaphysics, may be discussed before metaphysics, while the philosophy of nature and psychology depend throughout on ontological principles.  Together with natural theology the two latter sciences constitute “applied” metaphysics.  This in turn presupposes “general” metaphysics, which subdivides into four parts:  Methodology, Ontology, Synechology, i.e., the theory of the continuous ([Greek:  suneches]), which treats of the continua, space, time, and motion, and Eidolology, i.e., the theory of images or representations.  The last forms the transition to psychology, while synechology forms the preparation for the philosophy of nature, whose most general problems it solves.  Our exposition will not need to observe these divisions closely.