Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER II "COGITO, ERGO SUM" 40. Modern philosophy was born into distinct selfconsciousness in Bacon and Descartes: Bacon, the founder of empiricism or empirism, and Descartes, the founder of rationalism. In this fundamental opposition between experience and reason, sense and intellect, sensation and thought, as in the last analysis two necessarily separate or reciprocally exclusive origins of all human knowledge, modern philosophy not only had its conscious beginning, but has ever since lived its conscious life. As opposed principles (disregarding all illogical compromises of the two, which are valueless in philosophy), empirism holds that all human knowledge is at bottom self-transformed sensation --pure sense-activity, gradually transforming itself into thought without drawing on any other original element or energy than itself; while rationalism holds that all human knowledge at bottom is thought transforming sensation--pure intellect-activity, gradually constructing knowledge out of a sense-activity that is itself neither knowledge nor an origin of knowledge. But, inasmuch as both sense and intellect are merely different modes of activity of an energizing subject, both empirism and rationalism agree in holding that all human knowledge originates solely in the knowing subject, and that nothing in knowledge is either derived or derivable from the object known, at least as an actually given reality whose existence and nature are independent of all humanly subjective activities or conditions. In other words, both sense and intellect are simply modes of consciousness, sense giving all the " matter" and intellect giving all the "form" of human knowledge; and all so-called knowledge of a phenomenally external world is reduced to..."
