When we examine the early work of Husserl, we encounter the dominant influence of his teacher Brentano. It appears that Husserl also read the British empiricists, but that they did not determine the framework and background of his philosophy. All of Husserl's earliest publications were inspired by the later Brentano's descriptive analyses of origins.¹ Husserl was certainly a very independent and gifted student of Brentano. In his doctrine of acts of a higher order, he made his own contribution to descriptive psychology, though which it became possible to carry out descriptive analyses in the case of the fundamental concepts of Husserl's own academic field, i.e. mathematics.