Herbart studied under Fichte, but was influenced by Leibniz and Kant, whom he succeeded in the chair at Königsberg from 1808. He held that change was nothing but changing relationships between independent real simple elements; applied to the philosophy of mind this generated a kind of associationist psychology. In educational theory this in turn meant that new ideas become assimilated by a process of ‘apperception’, itself dependent upon the ground laid by preceding experience. His major work in psychology was Psychologie als Wissenschaft (1824–5) and his most important philosophical work the Allgemeine Metaphysik (1828–29).