If we combine the totality of the original Ideas into the unity of the person the concept of virtue arises.  If we reflect on the limitations which oppose the full realization of the ideal of virtue, we gain the concepts of law and duty.  An ethics, like that of Kant, which exclusively emphasizes the imperative or obligatory character of the good, is one-sided; it considers morality only in arrest, a mistake which goes with its false doctrine of freedom.  On the other hand, it was a great merit in Kant that he first made clear the unconditional validity of moral judgment, independent of all eudemonism.  Politics and pedagogics are branches of the theory of virtue.  The end of education is development in virtue, and, as a means to this, the arousing of varied interests and the production of a stable character.

In conclusion, we may sum up the points in which Herbart shows himself a follower of Kant—­he calls himself a “Kantian of the year 1828.”  His practical philosophy takes from Kant its independence of theoretical philosophy, the disinterested character of aesthetic judgment, the absoluteness of ethical values, the non-empirical origin of the moral concepts:  “The fundamental ethical relations are not drawn from experience.”  His metaphysics owes to Kant the critical treatment of the experience-concepts (its task is to make experience comprehensible), in which the leading idea in the Kantian doctrine of the antinomies, the inevitableness of contradictions, is generalized, extended to all the fundamental concepts of experience, and, as it were, transferred from the Dialectic to the Analytic; it owes to him, further, the conception of being as absolute position, and, finally, the dualism of phenomena and things in themselves.  Herbart (with Schopenhauer) considers the renewal of the Platonic distinction between seeming and being the chief service of the great critical philosopher, and finds his greatest mistake in the a priori character ascribed to the forms of cognition.  In the doctrine of the pure intuitions and the categories, and the Critique of Judgment, he rejects, and with full consciousness, just those parts of Kant on which the Fichtean school had built further.  Finally, Herbart’s method of thought, his impersonality, the at times anxious caution of his inquiry, and the neatness of his conceptions, are somewhat akin to Kant’s, only that he lacked the gift of combination to a much greater degree than his great predecessor on the Koenigsberg rostrum.  His remarkable acuteness is busier in loosening than in binding; it is more happy in the discovery of contradictions than in their resolution.  Therefore he does not belong to the kings who have decided the fate of philosophy for long periods of time; he stands to one side, though it is true he is the most important figure among these who occupy such a position.