in the first volume of the journal Logos in 1910-11 (pp. 289 ff.). Again, the call has at first the sense of a rejection. But here it aims in another direction than Hegel's. It concerns naturalistic psychology which claims to be the genuine scientific method of investigating consciousness. For this method blocks access to the phenomena of intentional consciousness from the very beginning. But the call "to the thing itself' is at the same time directed against historicism which gets lost in treatises about the standpoints of philosophy and in the ordering of types of philosophical Weltanschauungen. About this Husserl says in italics (ibid., p. 340): "The stimulus for investigation must start not with philosophies, but with issues [Sachen] and problems."

And what is at stake in philosophical investigation? In accordance with the same tradition, it is for Husserl as for Hegel the subjectivity of consciousness. For Husserl, the Cartesian Meditations were not only the topic of the Parisian lectures in February, 1920. Rather, since the time following the Logical Investigations, their spirit accompanied the impassioned course of his philosophical investigations to the end. In its negative and also in its positive sense, the call "to the thing itself" determines the securing and development of method. It also determines the procedure of philosophy by means of which the matter itself can be demonstrated as a datum. For Husserl, "the principle of all principles" is first of all not a principle of content, but one of method. In his work published in 1913, Ideas toward a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Husserl devoted a special section (section 24) to the determination of "the principle of all principles." "No conceivable theory can upset this principle," says Husserl:

"The principle of all principles" reads:

... Every originarily giving intuition [is] a source of legitimation for knowledge; everything that presents itself to us in the ‘Intuition’ originarily (in its bodily actuality, so to speak) [is] simply to be accepted as it gives itself, but also only within the limits in which it gives itself there ...

"The principle of all principles" contains the thesis of the precedence of method. This principle decides what matter alone can