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This is a study of the metaphysics and psychology of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841). A former student of Fichte, Herbart broke very early with the idealist current of the age. His philosophy of knowledge proposes an unorthodox reading of Kant, namely a realist and empiricist reading which rejects the invention of the transcendental. Refusing a critique of reason and of our capacity to know, Herbart sees his work as taking forward the critical legacy by elaborating a metaphysics of being and a wholly original psychology, to which he ascribes the status of a science, supported by mathematics. The realist ontology takes up the Kantian principle which sees being as a position, thus forcing us to leave the concept for the experience, but aims also to fill the gap between the phenomenon and the thing in itself, which implies a redefinition of substance. His psychology breaks with the psychology of the faculties – accepted by Kant – which does not criticise our supposed capacity to know, and thus initiates a redefinition of representation.