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Physiology is one of those fountains at which it is somewhat dangerous to 'taste, unless we 'drink deep; on account of the tendency of superficial knowledge to empiricism. Still, I am fully of the opinion that even superficial knowledge, on this long neglected topic, is less dangerous both to the individual and to the community, than entire ignorance.
You escape indeed the materialism that goes with the reigning empiricism; but you pay for your escape by losing contact with the concrete parts of life. The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down.
The facts being more complicated, and depending on a greater concurrence of forces, than in any other science, the difficulty of treating them deductively is proportionally increased, while the wide difference between any one case and every other in some of the circumstances which affect the result, makes the pretence of direct induction usually no better than empiricism.
But if as often happens empiricism, in relation to ideas, becomes itself dogmatic and boldly denies that which is above the sphere of its phenomenal cognition, it falls itself into the error of intemperance an error which is here all the more reprehensible, as thereby the practical interest of reason receives an irreparable injury.
They will assuredly not be disappointed if they open their minds to what the thicker and more radical empiricism has to say. I fully believe that such an empiricism is a more natural ally than dialectics ever were, or can be, of the religious life.
In regard to the third motive for the preliminary choice of a party in this war of assertions, it seems very extraordinary that empiricism should be utterly unpopular.
In these examples we see bad generalization a posteriori, or empiricism properly so called; causation inferred from casual conjunction, without either due elimination, or any presumption arising from known properties of the supposed agent.
Hume and Wolff conclude the two lines of development: under the former, empiricism disintegrates into skepticism; under the latter, rationalism stiffens into a scholastic dogmatism, soon to run out into a popular eclecticism of common sense.
Nor is it a little, that they have taught us to look into those mysterious chambers of our being, the abode of the spirit; and not a little, indeed, if what we are there permitted to know shall have brought with it the conviction, that we are not abandoned to a blind empiricism, to waste life in guesses, and to guess at last that we have all our lives been guessing wrong, but, unapproachable though it be to the subordinate Understanding, that we have still within us an abiding Interpreter, which cannot be gainsaid, which makes our duty to God and man clear as the light, which ever guards the fountain of all true pleasures, nay, which holds in subjection the last high gift of the Creator, that imaginative faculty whereby his exalted creature, made in his image, might mould at will, from his most marvellous world, yet unborn forms, even forms of beauty, grandeur, and majesty, having all of truth but his own divine prerogative, the mystery of Life.
But there is a great difference, materially as well as formally, between these kindred undertakings, a difference corresponding to that between Locke's empiricism and Kant's idealism.
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