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Updated: May 14, 2025
You recognize these contrasts as familiar; well, in philosophy we have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair of terms 'rationalist' and 'empiricist, 'empiricist' meaning your lover of facts in all their crude variety, 'rationalist' meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal principles.
The agreement of the two schools is still greater in regard to the relation of sense and understanding, notwithstanding the apparently sharp contrast between them. The empiricist considers thought transformed, sublimated perception, while the rationalist sees in perception only confused and less distinct thought.
But in that he finds in experience an order, an arrangement of things, not derived from experience in the usual sense of the word, he is not an empiricist. He has paid his own doctrine the compliment of calling it "criticism," as I have said. Now, I beg the reader to be here, as elsewhere, on his guard against the associations which attach to words.
Enquiring for her at tea time Soames learned that Fleur had been out in the car since two. Three hours! Where had she gone? Up to London without a word to him? He had never become quite reconciled with cars. He had embraced them in principle like the born empiricist, or Forsyte, that he was adopting each symptom of progress as it came along with: "Well, we couldn't do without them now."
Hence the empiricist will never allow himself to accept any epoch of nature for the first the absolutely primal state; he will not believe that there can be limits to his outlook into her wide domains, nor pass from the objects of nature, which he can satisfactorily explain by means of observation and mathematical thought which he can determine synthetically in intuition, to those which neither sense nor imagination can ever present in concreto; he will not concede the existence of a faculty in nature, operating independently of the laws of nature a concession which would introduce uncertainty into the procedure of the understanding, which is guided by necessary laws to the observation of phenomena; nor, finally, will he permit himself to seek a cause beyond nature, inasmuch as we know nothing but it, and from it alone receive an objective basis for all our conceptions and instruction in the unvarying laws of things.
The Essay mentioned really explains the point. Bentham not only admitted but asserted as energetically as became an empiricist, that we must allow for 'circumstances'; and circumstances include not only climate and so forth, but the varying beliefs and customs of the people under consideration.
Thus, though the great achievement of her life lay in the immense impetus which she gave to the scientific treatment of sickness, a true comprehension of the scientific method itself was alien to her spirit. Like most great men of action perhaps like all she was simply an empiricist. She believed in what she saw, and she acted accordingly; beyond that she would not go.
He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up.
The noise of facts resounds through all his chapters, the citations of fact never cease, he emphasizes facts, turns his face towards their quarter; and that is enough. It means the right kind of thing for the empiricist mind.
The knowledge that is possible to the empiricist, then, is merely that which is derived from direct experience, and simple summations or generalisations into a single assertion of a number of similar assertions, all of which were individually derived from experience.
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