In 1820, he published Erkenntnisslehre, Erfahrungsseelenlehre als Grundlage alles Wissens, and his inaugural dissertation De Veris Philosophiae Initiis.

His marked opposition to the philosophy of Hegel, then dominant in Berlin, was shown more clearly in the short tract, Neue Grundlegung zur Metaphysik (1822), intended to be the programme for his lectures as Privatdozent, and in the able treatise, Grundlegung zur Physik der Sitten (1822), written, in direct antagonism to Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, to deduce ethical principles from a basis of empirical feeling.

[4] The distinctive features of Beneke's system are the firmness with which he maintained that in empirical psychology is to be found the basis of all philosophy, and his rigid treatment of mental phenomena by the genetic method.

This and the introduction to his Lehrbuch signaled the two great stages in tile progress of psychology the negation of innate ideas by John Locke, and of faculties, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, by Herbart.

The true method of study is that applied with so much success in the physical sciences: critical examination of the given experience, and reference of it to ultimate causes, which may not be perceived, but are nevertheless hypotheses necessary to account for the facts.

Originally the soul is possessed of or is an immense variety of powers, faculties or forces (conceptions which Beneke, in opposition to Herbart, holds to be metaphysically justifiable), differing from one another only in tenacity, vivacity, receptivity and grouping.

[4] All psychical phenomena are explicable by the relation of impression and power, and by the flow of movable elements; the whole process of mental development is nothing but the result of the action and interaction of the above simple laws.

In general this growth may be said to take the direction of rendering more and more definite by repetition and attraction of like to like tile originally indefinite activities of the primary faculties.

The understanding is simply the mass of concepts lying in the background of unconsciousness, ready to be called up and to flow with force towards anything closely connected with them.

The very distinction between the three great classes, knowledge, feeling and will, may be referred to elementary differences in the original relations of faculty and impression.

As is the case with all empirical theories of mental development, the higher categories or notions, which are apparently shown to result from the simple elements, are really presupposed at every step.

Undoubtedly his minute analysis of temperament and careful exposition of the means whereby the young, unformed mind may be trained are of infinite value; but the truth of many of his doctrines on these points lends no support to the fundamental hypotheses, from which, indeed, they might be almost entirely severed.

[4] Beneke was a prolific writer, and besides the works mentioned above, published large treatises in several departments of philosophy, both pure and as applied to education and ordinary life.