Preface.

as "the value theorists of the BRENTANO school," although BRENTANO has not the slightest part in our value-theoretical works, and that "school" will therefore presumably have long since rejected them as heresy. Not long before, in a kind of psychological centennial report of the "Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie" Journal for Pedagogical Psychology, the position of representatives of a "scholastic method" in psychology was assigned to me, this time together with A. HÖFLER, with reference to BRENTANO'S familiarity with scholastic philosophy—although I must unfortunately confess that I completely lack such familiarity, from which much gain could certainly be drawn for modern science as well. Now, I can of course only find it appropriate if orienting accounts of the current state of philosophy, insofar as they consider it appropriate to speak of me at all, also commemorate the connection of my line of work with that of F. BRENTANO. I also certainly do not lack the grateful appreciation of the fact that, in my first attempts in the field of philosophical research, BRENTANO stood by my side in a then-benevolent spirit of encouragement: I shall run the less risk of underestimating such things, the greater the number of those to whom I have since endeavored to show similar kindness, and the less indifferent I am to the memory that these students of mine carry with them from the time of our work together. Nevertheless, I would have to consider the circumstances under which I once entered scientific work almost a kind of doom if, even a quarter-century later, neither the opponents nor the friends of BRENTANO can forgive me: the former, that I learned from BRENTANO; the latter, that I did not learn everything from BRENTANO, but in the course of my scientific activity, through honest effort, also learned a few things of my own—or, actually, learned from the facts. I think I should have earned by now the claim to count for myself and to be estimated according to the measure of what I might have been able to contribute through my own honest work to the