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.

    20/392 (page 4)
    for Bacon the only fruitful method is a first-hand study or observation of the facts of experience. Descartes is the founder of the great speculative movement which proceeds through Spinoza to Leibnitz and Kant and Hegel; Bacon is the founder of the English experiential and inductive movement represented by Locke, Berkeley and Hume, Hartley, the Mills, and Spencer. The characteristic works of the Cartesian movement are the Ethica more geometrico demonstrata of Spinoza and the Logic of Hegel; those of the Baconian are the Essay of Locke, which follows the ‘ historical, plain method,’ and the Treatise of Hume, ‘an attempt to introduce the experi¬ mental method of reasoning into moral subjects.’ The ambition of the former movement is the attainment of systematic completeness, the vision of all things in their ultimate and perfect unity, or in God ; such a philosophy rightly describes the subject-matter of its investigation, as well as the point of view from which it seeks to solve all its problems, in the words, De Deo. The ideal of the latter is to keep close to reality, to verify all its conclusions by reference to the facts of experience; it is always willing to sacrifice system and symmetry for faithfulness to the data of experience, speculative completeness for scientific correctness and empirical truth. The one effort is inspired by a passion for system, the other by a passion for actuality ; the temper of the one is idealistic, that of the other realistic. Though English philosophy begins, in Bacon, with an ambitious attempt to construct, at least in outline, the encyclopaedia of the sciences, the basis of the entire structure being ‘ natural history,’ or a collection of all the facts, it was not long before it narrowed its scope to the more specific problems of philosophy, and the experi¬ ential became the psychological or introspective method, the method of inner observation, which fixes attention upon the inner side of experience, or upon experience as such. This is the method common to Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, to the associationists and the Scottish intui- tionists.