This represented self, then, is the ego, the apperceptive system of the soul’s perturbations. As we will see in the final section on Herbart’s pedagogy, education just amounts to the best development of this ego, i.e., its virtuous character. This education (Ausbildung) culminates in science, by which Herbart means the soul’s self-knowledge in terms of his psychology. For this “science speaks of the soul as the ground of the represented world and of its own Self”. Thus, while Herbart’s language of a culminating, reflective science of the self may remind one of an Idealistic absolute science, he takes great pains to distance his notion of science from speculative or intuitionistic metaphysics. Yes, in “science”, the knower is the soul, and “knowing and known are one and the same, viz. the soul in the system of its self-preservations”; however, he adds, “I know of myself, not with innate, but with a permanently acquired knowledge” (SW VI: 191).