Publisher's Synopsis
From the INTRODUCTION.
The restlessness so characteristic of modern thought generally is even more noticeable in philosophy than in other departments.
The problems of metaphysics naturally form a favorite hunting-ground for negative criticism to disport itself. The young man fresh from the university, whose bent leads him into the region of speculative thought, feels it incumbent upon him to show his quality by the attempt to scuttle some hitherto established philosophic position.
Unfortunately the net result in positive knowledge of the heavy artillery of criticism so freely brought to bear on existing statements and solutions of speculative problems is exiguous in the extreme, recalling the relative proportions of "bread" and "sack" in the well-known quotation. It is much easier nowadays to snatch a measure of success as a critic than as a constructive thinker.
Let us take in review the main philosophical attitudes that have prevailed within the memory of the present generation and then consider in greater detail some of the more important positions of recent and current thought. Empiricism, now better known as the theory of the "Associational school" was the dominant attitude in the fifties and sixties of the last century in this country and to a large extent also on the continent of Europe.
This theory, the national output par excellence of British speculation, from its origin in Hobbes and Locke and its working out by the Scottish psychological school (setting aside for the moment its idealistic and skeptical reduction by Berkeley and Hume respectively), in the main took sense-perception as an irreducible basis and the mind in a psychological sense as the mere receiver and coordinator through its thought function of the ready-made perceptions, as they were assumed to be, which it obtained through the special senses. The theory won popularity owing to its plausibility and apparent accordance with plain common-sense. A closer analysis, however, discloses the fact that the doctrine of Empiricism really evades the main problems of philosophy, that its postulates are not ultimate in themselves, but presuppose conditions which the theory ignores, that its truth, such as it is, is little better than platitude, and that the truth claimed for it by some of its exponents is not truth at all but fallacy.
"Empiricism" or "Associationism" may indeed be regarded as historically a one-sided pendant to the equally one-sided dogmatism of the earlier Continental schools deriving from Descartes and Leibnitz.
It is also indirectly in the line of tradition of the old scholastic Nominalism.
Empiricism, however, it may be noted, though in itself mainly a psychological doctrine, had two important offshoots in what we may term popular philosophy viz. the materialism of the eighteenth century and the agnosticism of the nineteenth century. I regard the latter as deriving from British Empiricism, although some might be inclined to affiliate it to the "Criticism" of Kant. In this connection we must not forget, however, the part played by British Empiricism, through Hume and Reid, in Kant's thought.....
