“Although this science is usually called psychology we will deviate from this terminology for several reasons. The word «psyche» (or soul) has been used in philosophy to designat the metaphysical, persisting, simple, and immortal essence of the spirit, and its use therefore''implies certain assumptions which we cannot now entertain. We are only concerned with developing a doctrine of the nature of the human soul based upon "inner experience”. Thus we will deal only with inner anthropology. In thus narrowing our scope to the human spirit, we arrive at the topic of empirical psychology, or psychic anthropology. But our present task differs from empirical psychology, which is an experimental physics of inner life (eine innere Experimentalphysik) which remains forever fragmentary. We will not be satisfied with such a science. We want to achieve a [unified theory of inner life, a doctrine of inner nature, which will provide for [the study of] our inner psychic nature what 'the philosophy of nature now provides for physics. This part of psychic anthropology we want to call philosophical anthropology (From the introduction to Vol. 1, p. 36).

“Thus, Fries called his psychology “psychic anthropology” both to avoid the metaphysical assumptions of the old rational psychology and to indicate his dissatisfaction with the current « fragmentary » and mechanical empirical psychology. On the first account, in rejecting the old metaphysics of the soul, Fries accepted Kant's critique of rational psychology; on the second, in rejecting the merely empirical status of psychology, he disagreed with Kant's evaluation of the limited epistemological possibilities of psychology. Instead he maintained that psychology need not be “merely empirical”, that it can attain the true status of a science, and, in other words, that its phenomena can be rationally organized according to metaphysical criteria. Kant (1786; trans., 1970) had denied this possibility, claiming that the metaphysical principles of natural science were not applicable to psychology. Fries agreed that the principles which Kant referred to as “the metaphysical principles of natural science” could not be used in psychology, but he pointed out that these principles were really « metaphysical principles of outer nature », not natural science per se, and that another set of metaphysical criteria was possible.” (Leary, T he Psychology of Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843): Its Context, Nature, and Historical Significance, p. 231)