He continued his schooling at the Gymnasium for six years, and showed interest in philosophy, logic and Kant's work involving the nature of knowledge obtained from experience with reality.

He composed a few essays, which he had given to Fichte during his years at Jena, criticising the works of Schelling and advocating his contention for the German idealism promoted by others like Kant at the time.

While tutoring in Switzerland, Herbart met and came to know Pestalozzi, the Swiss educator involved with issues of reform in the schools.

Resigning from his tutoring position, Herbart went on to study Greek and mathematics at Bremen for three years, and then eventually moved on to attend Göttingen from 1801 to 1809.

[5] Regardless of his relentless studying, he met an eighteen-year-old English girl named Mary Drake one night when playing a game of charades.

But some conceptions are such that the more distinct they are made the more contradictory their elements become; so to change and supplement these as to make them at length thinkable is the problem of the second part of philosophy, or metaphysics.

[3] In Herbart's writings logic receives comparatively meagre notice; he insisted strongly on its purely formal character and expressed himself in the main at one with Kantians such as Fries and Krug.

[3] As a metaphysician he starts from what he terms the higher scepticism of the Humean–Kantian sphere of thought, the beginnings of which he discerns in Locke's perplexity about the idea of substance.

[3] By way of concrete illustration Herbart instances "the common observation that the properties of things exist only under external conditions.

Colour and tone present the appearance of inherence, but on looking closer we find they are not really immanent in things but rather presuppose a communion among several."

But to indicate this opposition in the qualities of the reals A+B, we must substitute for these symbols others, which, though only contingent aspects of A and B, i.e. representing their relations, not themselves, yet like similar devices in mathematics enable thought to advance.

[3] The elementary spatial relation Herbart conceives to be "the contiguity (Aneinander) of two points," so that every "pure and independent line" is discrete.

But an investigation of dependent lines which are often incommensurable forces us to adopt the contradictory fiction of partially overlapping, i.e. divisible points, or in other words, the conception of Continuity.

[note 1] But the contradiction here is one we cannot eliminate by the method of relations, because it does not involve anything real; and in fact as a necessary outcome of an intelligible form, the fiction of continuity is valid for the objective semblance.

But objective semblance corresponds with reality; the spatial or external relations of the reals in this case must, therefore, tally with their inner or actual states.

Motion, even more evidently than space, implicates the contradictory conception of continuity and cannot, therefore, be a real predicate, though valid as an intelligible form and necessary to the comprehension of the objective semblance.

[3] But in all this it has been assumed that we are spectators of the objective semblance; it remains to make good this assumption, or, in other words, to show the possibility of knowledge; this is the problem of what Herbart terms Eidolology, and forms the transition from metaphysic to psychology.

But to explain this modification is the business of psychology; it is enough now to see that the subject like all reals is necessarily unknown and that, therefore, the idealist's theory of knowledge is unsound.

But though the simple quality of the subject or soul is beyond knowledge, we know what actually happens when it is in connection with other's reals, for its self-preservations then are what we call sensations.

The five key ideas which composed his concept of individual maturation were Inner Freedom, Perfection, Benevolence, Justice and Equity or Recompense.

In order to develop an educational paradigm that would provide an intellectual base that would lead to a consciousness of social responsibility, Herbart advocated that teachers utilise a methodology with five formal steps: "Using this structure a teacher prepared a topic of interest to the children, presented that topic, and questioned them inductively, so that they reached new knowledge based on what they had already known, looked back and deductively summed up the lesson's achievements, then related them to moral precepts for daily living".

[9] In order to appeal to learners' interests, Herbart advocated using literature and historical stories instead of the drier basal readers that were popular at the time.

Whereas the moralistic tales in many of the primers and readers of the period were predictable and allegorical, Herbart felt that children would appreciate the psychological and literary nuances of the masterpieces of the canon.

Aesthetics elaborates the ideas involved in the expression called forth by those relations of object which acquire for them attribution of beauty or the reverse.

[3] In theology, Herbart held the argument from design to be as valid of divine activity as for human, and to justify the belief in a supersensible real, concerning which, however, exact knowledge is neither tenable nor on practical grounds desirable.

[3] Building upon the teaching methods of Pestalozzi, Herbart contributed to pedagogy a psychological basis to help facilitate better learning as well as to ensure children's character development.

Subscribing to Locke's empiricist viewpoint involving the tabula rasa, Herbart believed that the soul had no innate ideas or no already pre-established Kantian categories of thought.

The soul, considered to be a real, was thought to be completely passive initially as well as very resistant to changes outside factors exert and force upon it.

The way in which the soul helps to preserve itself from its outwardly perceived destruction is through Herbart's concept of Vorstellungen, or ideas or mental representations.

It is evident Herbart thought that ideas were not precise imitations of the existing items in the world but that they were the direct consequence of the interactions of individuals' experiences with the external environment.