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Updated: May 24, 2025
Consequently, it needs more evidence to establish an exception to a very general, than to a special, empirical law. And common usage agrees with this principle. The inferences called probable rest on approximate generalisations.
But that one should have such a "right" implies that there is an imperative element in the situation, an absolute standard somewhere. It seems to me that the secret of the difficulty lies in the nature of the situation, with which an empirical treatment must necessarily fail to deal. What we have called "the aesthetic experience" is really a positive toning of the general aesthetic attitude.
What means shall we employ to bridge the abyss? After elevating ourselves to admiration of the magnitude of the power, wisdom, and other attributes of the author of the world, and finding we can advance no further, we leave the argument on empirical grounds, and proceed to infer the contingency of the world from the order and conformity to aims that are observable in it.
But hereby the object itself is not more definitely determined in thought, but the question is only in what relation it, including all its determinations, stands to the understanding and its employment in experience, to the empirical faculty of judgement, and to the reason of its application to experience.
While then, on the one hand, experience, as empirical synthesis, is the only possible mode of cognition which gives reality to all other synthesis; on the other hand, this latter synthesis, as cognition a priori, possesses truth, that is, accordance with its object, only in so far as it contains nothing more than what is necessary to the synthetical unity of experience.
If man receives all his impressions and forms all his conceptions from the world of sense, and derives his experiences from the world of sense, it follows that the empirical world ought to be so constructed as to offer a wealth of truly human experiences.
Now there are only two ways in which a necessary harmony of experience with the conceptions of its objects can be cogitated. Either experience makes these conceptions possible, or the conceptions make experience possible. The assertion of an empirical origin would attribute to them a sort of generatio aequivoca.
The latter in carrying out its more practical aims requires, if it is to be saved from the narrowness of mere specialisation and from degenerating into empirical methods, the constant co-operation of those whose outlook is not narrowed down to the immediate practical end, but takes in the subject as a whole, and whose chief function is the better systematisation of knowledge.
It results from the necessity we are under, both individually and as a race, of reaching the abstract by way of the concrete, that there must be practice and an accruing experience with its empirical generalisation, before there can be science. Science is organised knowledge; and before knowledge can be organised, some of it must be possessed.
This distinction manifests itself likewise in the habits of thought peculiar to natural philosophers, some of whom the remarkably speculative heads may be said to be hostile to heterogeneity in phenomena, and have their eyes always fixed on the unity of genera, while others with a strong empirical tendency aim unceasingly at the analysis of phenomena, and almost destroy in us the hope of ever being able to estimate the character of these according to general principles.
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