The philosophical discourse on reality underwent substantial transformations over the course of the nineteenth century, thereby disclosing new perspectives for the problem of subject-matter in psychology. The tradition of ideal-realism emerged from early Romanticism and continued in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s late Romanticist dialectical thoughts. He overcame the Kantian epistemological dualism by a doctrine of the organic and the intellectual function without conceding their identity. Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg’s organic worldview then moves beyond Romanticism and devises a teleological order of reality whose centrepiece is the concept of movement. His student Wilhelm Dilthey continues the tradition but introduces several changes, drawing on historicism and moving towards philosophy of life. Together, the three scholars reach beyond the conflicting parties of idealism and realism, proposing not simply a compromise but the third way of ideal-realism. It allowed them to conceive insights for psychological research, thus advancing the Romanticist idea of Realpsychologie.