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Because this is science, and not philosophy in the sense which that word still conveys, when applied to subjects of this nature. We all know that the scientific man is a safe and brilliant practitioner. The most unspeculative men of practice have learned to prefer him and his arts to the best empiricism.
They can be rescued from empiricism, if at all, only by being submitted to some of the methods already characterised as applicable to science in general. The theory of free will, viz. that the will is determined by itself, and not by antecedents, was invented as being more in accordance with the dignity of human nature and our consciousness of freedom, than philosophical necessity.
The simplest theory of knowledge is that of Empiricism, which holds that all knowledge must be gained through experience of the outside world, and of our mental states. We see a blue wall, we obtain through our eyes an impression of blueness, and are able to make a statement: "This wall is blue."
That is inconsistent with Bentham's thoroughgoing empiricism. But he had antagonists to meet upon the other side: and, in meeting them, he was led to a doctrine which has been generally condemned for the very same faults as absolute and individualist. We have only to ask in what sense Bentham appealed to 'experience' to see how he actually reached his conclusions.
It is itself a part of the hegelian vision or intuition, and a part that finds the strongest echo in empiricism and common sense. Great injustice is done to Hegel by treating him as primarily a reasoner. He is in reality a naïvely observant man, only beset with a perverse preference for the use of technical and logical jargon.
It is obvious, accordingly, that even if the philosophy of experience represented by modern empiricism had received more general theoretical assent than has been accorded to it, it could not have furnished a satisfactory philosophy of the learning process.
By these means, then, it learns how to appropriate the results of fifteen hundred years development of philosophy, it gets rid of any separate natural philosophy which stands above or alongside of it and the limited method of thought brought over from English empiricism. London, 22nd September, 1885.
It is the logical outgrowth of those experimental studies with the microscope begun by our predecessors of the thirties, and it represents the present culmination of the rigidly experimental method which has brought medicine from a level of fanciful empiricism to the plane of a rational experimental science.
We can discover any actual law of connection between phenomena only by observing that they occur in succession. We cannot get beyond or behind the facts and therefore intuitionism in this sense is not opposed to empiricism, but a warrant for empirical conclusions. An 'intuition, briefly, is an unanalysable belief.
When this time shall come, no important branch of human affairs will be any longer abandoned to empiricism and unscientific surmise: the circle of human knowledge will be complete, and it can only thereafter receive further enlargement by perpetual expansion from within. Additional Elucidations Of The Science Of History.
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