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.

    76/392 (page 60)
    While he emphasises the necessity of sensation as providing the mind with the materials of knowledge, he is equally clear that knowledge itself is impossible without the constructive activity of the knowing mind. 4 Reason is not, as sense and memory, born with us ; nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is ; but attained by industry. . . . And whereas sense and memory are but knowledge of fact, which is a thing past and irrevocable ; science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another/ 1 A further proof of the extreme view attributed to Hobbes as to the part played by words in our so-called knowledge is sometimes found in what Professor Taylor has called his 4 ultra-nominalist position in logic.’ There is no founda¬ tion, however, for such an interpretation of his position. We find no denial, explicit or implicit, of the reality of the common element which entitles the several individuals to be called by the same name; on the contrary, this community of nature is implied in what he says as to the applicability of the name, and especially in his account of the office of the copula in the proposition. The copula 4 makes us think of the cause for which those names were imposed on that thing. As, for example, when we say a body is movable, though we conceive the same thing to be designed by both these names, yet our mind rests not there, but searches farther what it is to be a body, or to be movable, that is, wherein consists the difference between these and other things, for which these are so called, others not so called. They, therefore, that seek what it is to be anything, as to be movable, to be hot, etc., seek in things the causes of their names.’ 2 It may appear a more fundamental objection to Hobbes’s account of the first principles of human knowledge that definition, or the clear formulation of the ultimate principles alike of knowledge and of reality, is rather the goal than the starting-point of scientific inquiry. Rut what Hobbes is really describing is not so much the actual starting-point