afford to be indifferent to the vicissitudes of philosophy, call for little mention. This catalogue of names, however, requires some amplification.
The empirical philosophy which has been the characteristic weapon of the English sceptics of the nineteenth century may be said to date from the time of Locke. There is no finality in speaking of the birth of systems; still it was in Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding," published in 1690, that the principles of Sensism, or Sensationalism, or Empiricism, were first clearly enunciated. Locke himself was halting and inconsistent in the application of his declared principles; nevertheless, he was truly the "father" of recent British philosophy. His object was "to inquire into the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent." Hitherto philosophers had laboured and disputed upon different objects of human knowledge. Locke commenced the modern inquiry, more critical and more fundamental, into the nature, origin, and value of knowledge itself. The distinction had always been recognised between the mind, intellect, or intelligence, and the senses, and it had been thought that the mind had certain ideas or intuitions which had not come through the senses, whence most of our knowledge is obviously derived. Locke maintained that all our knowledge came through the senses; the mind was a mere tabula rasa, which received sense-impressions, combined and grouped them. The destructive consequences of such a system are apparent when it is known that the structure of proof which supports the theorems of the existence of God and the spirituality of the soul really rests upon those innate ideas or intuitions. Locke, however, did not pursue his principles so far; he remained a Theist. The system was little more than a revival of the principles of the Ionic school, which had been dormant for two thousand years. It is called Empiricism, or Sensationalism, because it reduces all knowledge to sensations (and their combinations) or experience (empeiria).
The new system was taken in hand in the eighteenth century by Hume and Berkeley in England, and by Condillac in France. By the middle of the century Condillac had shown the true consequences of the empirical method, rejecting the hesitation and the reservations (as of the notion
