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Stewart, in fact, accepts a good deal of Horne Tooke's doctrine, though calling Tooke an 'ingenious grammarian, not a very profound philosopher, but holds, as we shall see, that the materialistic tendency can be avoided. As becomes a nominalist, he attacks the syllogism upon grounds more fully brought out by J. S. Mill. Upon another essential point, he agrees with the pure empiricists.
Its success is also due to the fact that its framers were little influenced by the spirit of doctrinarianism. They were not empiricists, but very practical men. This is the more remarkable because they worked in a period of an emotional fermentation of human thought. The long-repressed intellect of man had broken into a violent eruption like that of a seemingly extinct volcano.
'I have never doubted, a recent Oxford writer says, that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single content or significance, one and whole and complete. Advance in thinking, in the hegelian universe, has, in short, to proceed by the apodictic words must be rather than by those inferior hypothetic words may be, which are all that empiricists can use.
Nominalists and realists, intuitionists and empiricists, idealists and materialists, represent different forms of a fundamental antithesis which appears to run through all philosophy. Each thinker is apt to take the postulates congenial to his own mind as the plain dictates of reason. Controversies between such opposites appear to be hopeless. They have been aptly compared by Dr.
There are foolish empiricists who believe that the granting of a paper constitution, prefaced by some high-sounding declaration, of itself confers the power of self-government upon a people. This is never so. Nobody can "give" a people "self-government," any more than it is possible to "give" an individual "self-help." You know that the Arab proverb runs, "God helps those who help themselves."
Rationalists and empiricists alike have been deceived in regard to the necessity for co-operation between the senses and the understanding. Sensibility furnishes the material manifold, which of itself it is not able to form, while the understanding gives the unifying form, to which of itself it cannot furnish a content.
We have, however, no more right as good empiricists to assert than to deny that all difference comes from 'circumstance. If we take 'man' as a constant quantity in our speculations, it requires at least a great many precautions before we can assume that our abstract entity corresponds to a real concrete unit.
Let us take in illustration the universal whiteness. If we believe that there is such a universal, we shall say that things are white because they have the quality of whiteness. This view, however, was strenuously denied by Berkeley and Hume, who have been followed in this by later empiricists.
According to Herbert Spencer, the mind is at first, as it were, an indifferent day, on which external impressions "rain," leaving traces more or less profound. "Experiences" are, according to him and the English empiricists, the constructive factors of the mind even in its highest activities.
The answer of the pure empiricists, that our mathematical knowledge is derived by induction from particular instances, we have already seen to be inadequate, for two reasons: first, that the validity of the inductive principle itself cannot be proved by induction; secondly, that the general propositions of mathematics, such as 'two and two always make four', can obviously be known with certainty by consideration of a single instance, and gain nothing by enumeration of other cases in which they have been found to be true.
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