EMPIRICISM
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EMPIRICISM
whole material universe. The reality of things he
places in their being perceived (esse rei est jjercipi), and
this " perceivedness " is effected in the mind by God,
not by the object or subject. He still retains the sub-
stance-reality of the human soul and of spirits gener-
ally, God included. Hume (d. 1776) agrees with his
two empiricist predecessors in teaching that the mind
knows only its own subjective organic impressions,
whereof ideas are but the images. The supersensible
is therefore unknowable; the principle of causality is
resolved into a mere feeling of successiveness of phe-
nomena ; its necessity is reduced to a subjective feeling
resulting from uniform association experienced in con-
sciousness, and the spiritual essence or substantial
being of the soul is dissipated into a series of conscious
states. Locke's sensism was taken up by Condillac
(d. 17S0), who eliminated entirely the subjective fac-
tor (Locke's "reflection") and sought to explain all
cognitional states by a mere mechanical, passive trans-
formation of external sensations. The French sensist
retained the spiritual soul, but his followers disposed
of it as Hume had done with the Berkeleian soul relic.
The Herbartians confound the image with the idea,
nor does Wundt make a clear distinction between
primitive concepts {empirische BcgriTfe, representations
of individual objects) and the image: " Denken ist
Phantasieren in Begriffen und Phantasieren ist Den-
ken in Bildern".
(3) Poeitivism. — Positivists, following Comte (d. 1S57), do not deny the supersensible; they declare it unknowable; the one source of cognition, they claim, is sense-experience, experiment, and induction from phenomena. John Stuart Mill (d. 1S70), following Hume, reduces all knowledge to series of conscious states linked by empirical associations and enlarged by inductive processes. The mind has no certitude of an external world, but only of "a permanent possi- bility of sensations" and antecedent and anticipated feelings. Spencer (d. 1903) makes all knowledge rela- tive. The actual existence of things is their persist- ence in consciousness. Consciousness contains only subjective feelings. The relative supposes the abso- lute, but the latter is unknowable to us; it is the object of faith and religion (Agnosticism). AH things, mind included, have resulted from a cosmical process of mechanical evolution wherein they are still involved; hence all concepts and principles are in a continuous flux.
The Teaching of Catholic Philosophy is that sense- experience is a source, and indeed the primary source, of human knowledge, but it holds that there are other sources beyond sensations. There is nothing in the intellect that had not its birth in sense; this is one of the generalizations of the School. Moreover, though every intellectual act is accompanied by sen- sory motion, and especially by some sense representa- tion (phantasma) evoked in the imagination, never- theless sensation and sensuous representation (phan- tasma, image) differ essentially from the idea produced in and by the intellect, which is an imma- terial, supersensuous and superorganic power or faculty. The theory here proposed may be called empinco-intellectualism since it conjoins a sensuous factor with the purely intellectual or immaterial agency in the genesis of knowledge. Its bases are as follows: (a) Ideas represent the natures or essences of things, not the mere sensuous qualities, the phenom- ena of things, but the underlying subject and cause thereof, e. g. substance, life, cause, truth, etc.; while ideas of sensuous qualities as such represent them in the abstract and as universal, e. g. light, (b) The mind pos.sesses ideas of things (substances and accidents) immaterial, invisible, possible, and impossible, etc., e. g. ideas of God, spirit, etc. — ideas which cannot be formed from purely sensuous presentations or images, (c) We make clear-cut distinctions between the essen- tial and accidental or contingent properties and attri-
butes of things, (d) Every predicate idea represents
not a congeries of sensuous qualities, but what the
subject is (its essence), under some particular aspect.
Now none of these peculiarities of the idea can be dis-
covered in any sensation or image, which always rep-
resents sensuous phenomena, existent and concrete.
Locke's "reflection" and Condillac's "processes of
association" will not suffice to transmute sensations
into iileas, since these two states are essentially, be-
cause objectively (representatively), different. Posi-
tivists inadvertently slip in an immaterial agency,
whereby indeed they beg the question when they ap-
peal to induction to explain the genesis of knowledge;
the inductive process involves universal alistract prin-
ciples and logical laws which are constituted of ideas
that essentially transcend sensations. Tlie supersen-
suous character of ideas follows etjually from their
"extension" or range of applicability. Ideas as
representative of essences, are available as predicates,
and are the terms whereof absolutely universal princi-
ples are constituted. Hence ideas are universal,
whereas sensations and images can represent only
objects that affect the sensory organs, i. e. individual,
physically existing olijects. Moreover, ideas represent
objects as abstract — physicallti abstract, e. g. individ-
ual sensible qualities; inathcmaticall;/ abstract, e. g.
extension and number; metaphysically abstract, e. g.
nature, entity, substance, truth, etc. And indeed un-
less ideas were of the abstract there could be no science,
physical, mathematical, or philosophical; all these
sciences consider their objects apart from concrete
individual determinations. No intellectual judgment
whatsoever would be possible, since every predicate is
a generalized term and hence in some degree ab-
stract. Sensation cannot represent an abstract object;
for though the sight, e. g., perceives colour apart from
sound, neverthele.ss (a) no sense can abstract from the
subject-matter — from the existence and individuality
of its proper object; the eye does not see colour as
such and abstracted, but the coloured object physically
and individually existing — (b) no sense can abstract
from its proper object (its appropriate stimulus or
object-quality), nor from its common object (quan-
tity, the extended object), (c) a fortiori, no sense can
perceive one dimension of extension or a mathema-
tical point, or things non-existent, or abstract forms
like man and humanity.
Nor does the common image suffice to explain the universal idea as Locke and the Herbartians suppose, for the common image, though indistinct, remains always in some way concrete and sensible; since the imagination as primarily reproductive can represent only what the senses have reported. Consciousness attests this; for if the imagination represent e. g. a triangle, it is always of some certain size and shape; it cannot represent a triangle which is neither rectangu- lar, obtuse, nor acute; while the idea of a triangle pre- scinds from every size or shape. Besides the image there is therefore the thought, the intellectual concept, the latter differing essentially from the former. Hence the common image is not predicable of the individuals distributively, because it is still somehow concrete, singular, sensible, material, and represents only qual- ity. Nor can it be predicated as confusedly blendirijg all its inferiors, because the predicate of a judgment is attributed according to comprehension rather than extension. At best, moreover, the image is like to things; the concept is identical with the subject of which it is predicated. According to the empiricists the common image results from a comparison of repre- sentations, so that what is common to them, i. e. some pre-eminent quality, stands as the concept. Bvit the intellect would thus have to immediately perceive and compare the images, which is impossible; nor could it form a concept unless a number of sense perceptions and representations of a thing or things of the same species had preceded. VVe know, however, that we
