 Marty’s career can be best viewed from the perspective of his relationship to Brentano. Already in 1867, before Marty began to study at a university, he had written a prize winning essay “St. Thomas’ Doctrine of Abstraction of Supersensory Ideas from Sensory Images, with an Exposition and Critique of Other Theories of Knowledge”, in which he cited Brentano’s recently published works on Aristotle (Brentano 1862 and Brentano 1867). He was so inspired by these works that he requested permission from his bishop to study in Würzburg, where Brentano, also at the time a Catholic priest, had just been appointed lecturer after triumphantly engaging in a formal disputation with a disciple of Schelling. One of the theses that Brentano defended in this disputation was: “The true method of philosophy is none other than that of the natural sciences” (Brentano, [ed.] Kraus 1929, 147). In the autumn of 1868 Marty began attending Brentano’s lectures in which this thesis was applied to various areas of philosophy. He and Carl Stumpf, who had already been studying in Würzburg, became friends with each other and disciples of Brentano in the renewal of philosophy and religion (Stumpf 1919, 88 ff.). In such a renewal all the speculative excesses of German Idealism from earlier in the century had to be purged and replaced with rigor and clarity of thought, not to mention a relentless adherence to the empirical source of knowledge.