THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
man, to permit their ready surrender to the hostile verdict of reason;
it was inevitable that this faith and this hope, so condemned, would question
the competence of the judge, and would call for an examination of
reason as well as of religion. What was this intellect that proposed to
destroy \vith a syllogism the beliefs of thousands of years and millions of
men? Was it infallible? Or was it one human organ like any other, with
strictest limits to its function? and its powers? The time had come to judge
this judge, to examine this ruthless Revolutionary Tribunal that was
dealing out death so lavishly to every ancient hope. The time had come
for a critique of reason*
2. FROM LOCKE TO KANT
The way had been prepared for such an examination by
the work of
Locke, Berkeley and Hume; and yet, apparently, their results too were
hostile to religion.
John Locke f 1632-1 704} had proposed to apply to psychology the
inductive tests and methods of Francis Bacon; in his great Essay on
Human Understanding '1689} reason,
for the first time in modern
thought, had turned in upon itself, and philosophy had begun to scrutinize
the instrument which it so long had trusted. This introspective movement
m philosophy grew step by step with the introspective novel as developed
by Richardson and Rousseau: just as the sentimental and emotional color
of Clarissa Harlowe and La Nouuelle Heloise had its counterpart in the
philosophic exaltation of instinct and feeling above intellect and reason.
Howr does knowledge arise? Have we, as some good people suppose,
innate ideas, as, for example, of right and \vrong, and God, ideas inher-
ent in the mind from birth, prior to all experience? Anxious theologians,
worried lest belief in the Deity should disappear because God had not
vet been seen in any telescope, had thought that faith and morals might
be strengthened if their central and basic ideas w r ere shown to be inborn
in every normal soul. But Locke, good Christian though he was, ready
to argue most eloquently for "The Reasonableness of Christianity," could
not accept these suppositions; he announced, quietly, that all our knowledge
comes from experience and through our senses that "there is nothing
in the mind except what was first in the senses." The mind is at birth
a clean sheet, a tabula rasa; and sense-experience writes upon it in a
thousand ways, until sensation begets memory and memory begets ideas.
All of which seemed to lead to the startling conclusion that since only
material things can effect our sense, we know nothing but matter, and
must accept a materialistic philosophy. If sensations are the stuff of
thought, the hasty argued, matter must be the material of mind.
Not at all, said Bishop George Berkeley (1684-1753); this Lockian
analysis of knowledge proves rather that matter does not exist except as a