English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth.

  • James Seth
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    these writers there is a diversity of philosophical tendency, and if we take account of writers who, though of in¬ ferior merit, are yet of much significance—the Cambridge Platonists, the 4 moral sense ’ school of moralists, the Scottish intuitionists, and the advocates of absolute idealism —we discover a contrariety of doctrine which suggests a vigour and independence in the English philosophical mind which is hardly less remarkable than the charac¬ teristic stream of tendency which is generally identified with it. Yet there is such a characteristic stream of tendency. Three main features can hardly fail to arrest the attention of the student of English philosophy, features which differentiate it from the philosophy of the Continent. These are (i) its experiential and inductive method, as distinguished from the rationalistic and deductive method of Continental philosophy; (2) the epistemological character of the former, in contrast with the ontological character of the latter ; and (3) the practical or ethical interest which dominates the English, as contrasted with the metaphysi¬ cal and speculative interest which dominates the Con¬ tinental philosophy. (1) Bacon shares with Descartes the honour of inau¬ gurating the modern period of philosophy. Bacon’s protest against the principle of authority, a principle which had been accepted with more or less unhesitating loyalty by the Scholastic philosophers, is no less vigorous than that of Descartes. Both alike are eager to substitute for faith and tradition the independent effort of the indi¬ vidual mind in the pursuit of truth. Bacon extends his protest to antiquity itself (for is not antiquity the youth of the world ?), and to the chief philosopher of Greek anti¬ quity who was also 4 the philosopher ’ of the Middle Ages. He repudiates the method of the Aristotelian logic which had ruled the Scholastic philosophy in its period of maturity—the syllogistic or deductive method —and would substitute for it the inductive method of modern science. Descartes insists upon 4 clear and distinct ideas ’ as the method of philosophical thought;
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