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Empiricism sticks to the external senses. Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact-if that should seem a likely place to find him.

His assumption that conscious experiences freely compound and separate themselves, the same assumption by which absolutism explains the relation of our minds to the eternal mind, and the same by which empiricism explains the composition of the human mind out of subordinate mental elements, is not one which we ought to let pass without scrutiny. I shall scrutinize it in the next lecture.

For both, reality as well as truth are integrally given in eternity. Both are opposed to the idea of a reality that creates itself gradually, that is, at bottom, to an absolute duration. Now, it might easily be shown that the conclusions of this metaphysic, springing from science, have rebounded upon science itself, as it were, by ricochet. They penetrate the whole of our so-called empiricism.

All true science begins with empiricism though all true science is such exactly, in so far as it strives to pass out of the empirical stage into that of the deduction of empirical from more general truths.

Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views.

Has he rebuked the presumptions of humanity? has he called upon proud reason to humble itself? has he gibed human philosophy, and even gloried for a moment in the contradictions of empiricism?

Physico-theology is therefore incapable of presenting a determinate conception of a supreme cause of the world, and is therefore insufficient as a principle of theology a theology which is itself to be the basis of religion. The attainment of absolute totality is completely impossible on the path of empiricism. And yet this is the path pursued in the physico-theological argument.

In a word, scientific empiricism was beginning to gain a hearing in medicine as against the metaphysical preconceptions of the earlier generations. I have just adverted to the fact that Napoleon Bonaparte, as First Consul and as Emperor, was the victim of a malady which caused him to seek the advice of the most distinguished physicians of Paris.

We no more believe in that empiricism which demand, absolutely unrestrained individualism than we do in that empiricism which clamors for a deadening socialism which would destroy all individual initiative and would ruin the country with a completeness that not even an unrestrained individualism itself could achieve.

If on matters so much the most important with which human intellect can occupy itself a more general agreement is ever to exist among thinkers; if what has been pronouncedthe proper study of mankindis not destined to remain the only subject which Philosophy can not succeed in rescuing from Empiricism; the same process through which the laws of many simpler phenomena have by general acknowledgment been placed beyond dispute, must be consciously and deliberately applied to those more difficult inquiries.