ABSTRACT
Husserl’s Phenomenology stemmed from Brentano’s critique of the atomistic and associationistic psychology of Hume and Mill. Brentano realised that the then prevalent English theories of mental life were impotent to do justice to the notions of conception, judgement and inference, of the will and of the feelings. The attempt to reduce all mental operations, attitudes and states to sensations and their echoes, randomly coagulated by association, inevitably eliminated just what make the differences between thinking and mere wandering, between choice and mere impulse, between judgement and mere fancy, between inference and mere suggestion, between doubt and mere vacancy.
