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Updated: May 14, 2025
From the few fragments that remain, it is not easy to discover how he arrived at his opinions, but there are some sayings that strongly suggest scientific observation as the source. "The things that can be seen, heard, and learned," he says, "are what I prize the most." This is the language of the empiricist, to whom observation is the sole guarantee of truth.
The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion. I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if I head the columns by the titles 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded' respectively.
Herbert Spencer says somewhere that the yolk of an egg is homogeneous, the highly heterogeneous bird being differentiated in it by the law of evolution. I cannot think what assured Spencer of this homogeneity in the egg, except the fact that perhaps it all tasted alike, which might seem good proof to a pure empiricist.
Descartes, the rationalist, had despised experience, and Bacon, the empiricist, had despised mathematics; but Locke aims to show that while the reason is the instrument of science, demonstration its form, and the realm of knowledge wider than experience, yet this instrument and this form are dependent for their content on a supply of material from the senses.
In treatment he had not the simplicity of Hippocrates: he had great faith in drugs and collected plants from all parts of the known world, for the sale of which he is said to have had a shop in the neighborhood of the Forum. As I mentioned, he was an eclectic, held himself aloof from the various schools of the day, calling no man master save Hippocrates. He might be called a rational empiricist.
No one can live an hour without both facts and principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it breeds antipathies of the most pungent character between those who lay the emphasis differently; and we shall find it extraordinarily convenient to express a certain contrast in men's ways of taking their universe, by talking of the 'empiricist' and of the 'rationalist' temper.
K'ang was a scholar who belonged to the empiricist school of philosophy of the early Manchu period, the so-called Han school. He was a man of strong and persuasive personality, and had such an influence on the emperor that in 1898 the emperor issued several edicts ordering the fundamental reorganization of education, law, trade, communications, and the army.
After those visits to the Restaurant Bretagne began, other visits ceased without, indeed, any definite decision, for Soames, like all Forsytes, and the great majority of their countrymen, was a born empiricist.
In his moral philosophy Hume shows himself the empiricist only, not the skeptic. The laws of human nature are capable of just as exact empirical investigation as those of external nature; observation and analysis promise even more brilliant success in this most important, and yet hitherto so badly neglected, branch of science than in physics.
But, of course, all such assertions are superficial in character there is little more in them than the application of a conventional term to an observed phenomenon, they avail us little in solving the mysteries of the universe. Strictly speaking, this is for the empiricist the limit of possible knowledge, but he would be a poor investigator who would be content with this and no more.
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