quently they are equally inadequate to the problem which they profess to solve. The appeal to the subjective factor in the constitution of knowledge has been unsuccessful.

The psychological predecessors of Kant require less attention. Their work had not so much direct influence upon his speculation, the importance of Hume notwithstanding. The British successors of Descartes, like Descartes himself, made a certain gratuitous assumption. They held that the senses were the main sources of true knowledge. Experience, viewed as the contact with reality by means of the bodily organism, they considered the efficient cause of ideas. Although, in the absence of other basis, irresistible intuition guarantees such notions as God and self, all other information is traceable to the senses. Impressions produce simple ideas, and more complex conceptions, which involve knowledge of the "relations of things," are due to a supposititious causal reference. We are acquainted with the qualities of substance, for example, but of substance itself we are ignorant, and so we suppose it to be the substratum necessary to the inherence of qualities. The unknowable, in short, was for Locke the groundwork of all the most certain contents of knowledge. Berkeley, perceiving the absurdity of the position, attempted to express this unintelligible substance in terms of the intelligible. He too assumed, in the first instance, that the senses convey true knowledge. But he set this knowledge in an entirely new relation to the thinker. So far from the mind being a tabula rasa on which sensation writes, it is rather a conscious activity whose perceptions bring sensation into the sphere of reality. Esse is percipi. It is a

power, moreover, which gains in constitutive faculty as time goes on. In the course of experience it stores up certain occurrences, as it were, and reproduces them, by a kind of redintegration, in the guise of suggestions. Thus at last, on the occasion of specified sense perceptions, the thinker spontaneously invests them with numerous relations, and so the bare impression is clothed in an ideal completeness, of which it is the suggestion but not the cause. Even this explanation,

fascinating as it is in comparison with Locke's, does not take us beyond the empirical standpoint. It is good, maybe, for each individual apart, yet it carries no conviction for others. The assumption still is that knowledge truly exists, and, by consequence, little notice is taken of problems respecting the manner of its existence. Nay, Berkeley's theory is gifted with the semblance of adequacy only by the introduction of unwarranted elements. Consequently Hume, culling premisses from Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley indifferently, took it upon himself to show that knowledge, if dependent on sensational experience, is impossible. Everything is an appearance, the effect of illusion rendered permanent by custom. If man know nothing but sense impressions, and the ideas which follow upon them, then self-consciousness is a delusion resting on two others, and causality is a misleading name which the thinker gives to his own mental impotence. Hume's conclusion thus is, that on the basis of empiricism, systematic knowledge cannot be accounted for save by the supposition that it is the negation of knowledge. Thought is explained only when the utter absurdity of it is fully realised. Consequently, as in the case of reason, the appeal to sense fails lamentably.

II. Berkeley's Nominalistic and Realistic Tendencies.

It is impossible, however, to dismiss Berkeley in the summary manner just indicated. His early nominalism constitutes but a portion of his contribution to speculative theory; and, no matter how convenient it may be to make no further reference, the facts of the case do not permit that total elimination of his later thought in which too many historians are wont to indulge themselves. On the contrary, the truth, so far as concerns Berkeley the man, is that his Platonising ideas tend to be the more eminently characteristic.

Fichte once pertinently remarked that "the kind of philosophy which one chooses depends on the kind of man one is. For a philosophical system is not a dead bit of furniture which one can take to one's self, or dispose of as one pleases; but it is endowed with a soul by the soul of the man who has it."1 Unless there be a conviction that a living metaphysical principle forms an integral part of thought and nature, it is little likely that metaphysical questions, properly so called, will meet response in the individual mind. Those who insist upon weighing things unseen and eternal in the scales of sense and time will probably always be with Mechanical categories or biological relationships are all too naturally presumed capable of presenting an exhaustive account of religion and morals. The metaphysical assumptions necessarily implied in mechanics and physiology do not invariably trouble investigators who have been indebted to them. It is obvious, too, that during entire stages in the history of thought the apparent size of objects has obscured real bulk-and

us.

1 Werke, vol. ii. p. 155.

everything else beyond the immediate range of vision. So it was with the Greece of the Sophists, so also with Carneades and the Academy, and so with the third quarter of the present century, when, for a brief period, materialism threatened to sweep the board. But this tendency never had better example than in the mental condition of a whole continent, with England most distinguished by defect, during the "second-hand" century, as Carlyle has aptly called it. As in literature so was it in philosophy. "The slops of the court of the Stuarts went into the drama. In philosophy the age had no live, distinct, actuating convictions." From the prevalence of this spiritual obliquity and moral blindness no one suffered more than Berkeley. In many respects he was the single philosophical prophet calling, as if in a wilderness, to a stiff-necked generation. Where his work was merely destructive-as all metaphysical criticism must, in its first stages, become—it was eagerly canvassed and partly accepted. When it contained constructive elements, and more especially when it pointed to an ultimate theory of the world, it was scorned, distorted, or, as was the historical fact, passed over unheeded. But, as often happens, time is now bringing him some measure of his reward, and the rays thrown upon him by later speculation may, on inquiry, be found to surround his thought with fresh importance, and to reveal its living relation to problems of present interest.

British speculation throughout the century, marked chiefly by the publication of the 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding'1 and the Treatise on Human Nature,' is often called the Lockian epoch. During

2

this period nearly all systematic thinking was determined by the methods and aims of Locke's famous work. Here Locke proposed to discuss the contents, and especially the limits, of human faculty in a "plain historical way." He prepared himself to take experience very much as he found it; and he desired to submit it to an analysis which would exhibit its principal parts, rather than to transform its meaning or elucidate its final import. To lay hold upon obvious facts, to arrive at tolerably assured conclusions-these were his ideals. There was no effort to construct a system. Indeed, so far was he from attempting anything of the sort, that he deliberately set in the background two of the main subjects which are integral portions of a complete philosophical whole. Of ultimate problems relative to the material universe, as of high questions concerning deity, he has little to say except by implication. Man alone, and in particular man's intellectual power, engages his close attention. His method, therefore, tended towards a species of nominalism. The individual interested him much more than the universal. His strange lack of historical imagination-in which he may be compared with Schopenhauer-fostered this tendency. One has only to contrast his Treatise on Government' with any modern work on the subject to be impressed by this. In the fourth book of the Essay' also, where the allimportant question of relation is discussed, this distrust of the universal appears very strongly. The individual mind is conversant about ideas, which are its immediate objects it is plainly not so familiar with the relations between these ideas.

But, evidently, if this be the case, Locke can only