Dewey's criticism of intuitionism scarcely does justice to that method, whatever may be its inherent weakness. There doubtless have been thinkers who held that truth is revealed to the reason of man in its naked purity, in the shape of apodictic intellectual principles. But even in the case of so extreme a position as that of Kant, there are important qualifying considerations to be taken into account. There is no reason to suppose that moral judgment, as Kant conceived it, was excluded from the consideration of relevant data, such as the knowledge of actual effects produced by given courses of conduct. His position seems to have been, not that moral judgment lacked specific content, but that reason took something with it to the moral situation. The intuitionists may have over-estimated the original endowment of the mind, but it must be admitted with them that the mind which approaches the moral situation empty of concepts cannot make moral decisions. If man is to hold no beliefs except those proved valid by experience, how can there be any to validate? Intelligence must have the capacity to frame beliefs in the light of its past knowledge, and its acts of judgment, consequently, presuppose a test of the validity of ideas which belongs to intelligence as such, and not to history taken abstractly. Beliefs are adapted to their objects in the making, and on this account are usually found to have had some justification, even where set aside. 'A principle that is suitable for universal legislation already presupposes a content.' Dewey next considers the relation of the evolutionary methods to empiricism. "Empiricism," he says, "is no more historic in character than is intuitionalism. Empiricism is concerned with the moral idea or belief as a grouping or association of various elementary feelings. It regards the idea simply as a complex state which is to be explained by resolving it into its elementary constituents. By its logic, both the complex and the elements are isolated from an historic context.... The empirical and the genetic methods thus imply a very different relationship between the moral state, idea, or belief, and objective reality.... The empirical theory holds that the idea arises as a reflex of some existing object or fact. Hence the test of its objectivity is the faithfulness with which it reproduces that object as copy. The genetic theory holds that the idea arises as a response, and that the test of its validity is found in its later career as manifested with reference to the needs of the situation that evoked it."[164]