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Updated: September 15, 2025
We know nothing about it; and Kant, speaking in the name of the "apriorists," who hold that the idea of time is innate in us, does not teach us much when he tells us that time, like space, is an a priori form of our sensibility, that is to say, an intuition preceding experience, even as Guyau, among the "empiricists," who consider that this idea is acquired only by experience, does not enlighten us any more by declaring that this same time is the abstract formula of the changes in the universe.
Pluralistic empiricists, on the other hand, have remained in the world of sense, either naïvely and because they overlooked the intellectualistic contradictions, or because, not able to ignore them, they thought they could refute them by a superior use of the same intellectualistic logic. Thus it is that John Mill pretends to refute the Achilles-tortoise fallacy.
The empiricists described it as a process of comparison and discrimination, as the mere perception and recognition of the relations and connections already existing between ideas; while in reality judgment does not discover the relations and connections of representations, but itself establishes them. In the former case the synthetic moment is ignored, in the latter the active moment.
That they do this says much for their mood and taste, but not quite so much for their powers of discrimination or for their consistency. It is even more thoughtless than when the empiricists and sensationalists acclaim as their hero, Spinoza, the strict, pure rationalist, the despiser of empiricism and of knowledge acquired through the senses.
But all such differences are minor matters which ought to be subordinated in view of the fact that, whether we be empiricists or rationalists, we are, ourselves, parts of the universe and share the same one deep concern in its destinies. We crave alike to feel more truly at home with it, and to contribute our mite to its amelioration.
Naturally the empiricists refused to bow to an authority which was simply saying, 'Don't inquire further, without any ground for the prohibition except the 'ipse dixitism' which declared that inquiry must be fruitless.
Reason was for so long servile to idle theology, it is not at all surprising that a work exemplifying reason to such high degree as does the Ethics, should receive scant respect from intrepid empiricists. It is so easy to confuse the rationalizations of reason with the nature of reason itself.
The empiricists hold to the result, while they either weaken or completely misunderstand the rationalism of the method: the a priori factor, says Fries, was not reached by a priori, but by a posteriori, means, and there is no other way by which it could have been reached.
It has often been claimed by those who do not sympathize with empiricism that the empiricists make assumptions much as others do, but have not the grace to admit it. I think we must frankly confess that a man may try hard to be an empiricist and may not be wholly successful.
One of the great historic controversies in philosophy is the controversy between the two schools called respectively 'empiricists' and 'rationalists'. The empiricists who are best represented by the British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume maintained that all our knowledge is derived from experience; the rationalists who are represented by the Continental philosophers of the seventeenth century, especially Descartes and Leibniz maintained that, in addition to what we know by experience, there are certain 'innate ideas' and 'innate principles', which we know independently of experience.
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