ABSTRACT
Eight decades earlier, Johann Friedrich Herbart took an even bolder step, arguably aspiring to become the "Newton of the intellect" – something Kant had thought impossible. To fully appreciate what Herbart achieved for the study of the mind, we need to understand some of the central changes that took place in the wider framework of European science in the so-called "Sattelzeit" (saddle period) around 1800. According to Kant, there is a deep and unsurmountable gap between the study of natural and that of mental phenomena. The study of the mind, he suggested, could only be properly called a science if it managed to apply quantitative methods to its subject matter and base itself on the collection of empirical data. A second problem stems, according to Kant, from the very source of our knowledge about those phenomena. Herbart criticized the dominant faculty psychology for various reasons.
