Herbart, JOHANN FRIEDRICH, a German philosopher, was born at Oldenburg, May 4, 1776. At a very early age he was familiar with religious and metaphysical doctrines and discussions, and in his eighteenth year he became the pupil of Fichte at Jena. In 1805 he was appointed extra-ordinary professor of Philosophy at Göttingen; in 1809 he went to Königsberg as Kant's successor; but in 1833 returned to Göttingen, where he remained till his death, August 14, 1841. His collected works were published by his scholar Hartenstein (12 vols. 1850–52; new ed. 1883 et seq.).
Herbart starts from the Kantian position by analysing experience. In his system logic, metaphysics, and aesthetics rank as co-ordinate elements. Logic deals with the formal elements of thought, metaphysics and aesthetics with its content. Of these two the former investigates those of our empirical conceptions which are given us in experience, and which cannot be alienated from our thought, whilst the latter deals with those conceptions which involve judgments of approval or disapproval. The most characteristic features of his thinking are, however, these. He posits a multiplicity of 'reals,' or things which possess in themselves absolute existence apart from apperception by the mind of man. He rejects the notion of separate mental faculties, substituting in their place the conception of primordial presentations or forces, from whose action and interaction all psychological phenomena result. From the conditions which determine the equilibrium and movement of these presentations he deduces a statics and a dynamics of mind, both amenable to mathematical manipulation, and thus introduces psychology to a place among the exact sciences. Ethics he ranks as a branch of aesthetics; it investigates the agreement or disagreement between volition and the fundamental moral ideas.
His works on the science of education have a peculiar value, and have been much studied of late. See books on Herbart by Thilo (1875), Zimmermann (1877), and Wagner (7th ed. 1894); De Garmo, Herbart and the Herbartians (1895); the translation of Herbart's Science of Education by Mr and Mrs Felkin (1895); and Ufer's Pedagogy of Herbart (trans. 1896).