The philosophic empiricism initiated by Locke was thus disintegrative in
intent. It optimistically took it for granted that when the burden of
blind custom, imposed authority, and accidental associations was
removed, progress in science and social organization would spontaneously
take place. Its part was to help in removing the burden. The best way to
liberate men from the burden was through a natural history of the origin
and growth in the mind of the ideas connected with objectionable beliefs
and customs. Santayana justly calls the psychology of this school a
malicious psychology. It tended to identify the history of the formation
of certain ideas with an account of the things to which the ideas
refer--an identification which naturally had an unfavorable effect on
the things. But Mr. Santayana neglects to notice the social zeal and aim
latent in the malice. He fails to point out that this "malice" was
aimed at institutions and traditions which had lost their usefulness; he
fails to point out that to a large extent it was true of them that an
account of their psychological origin was equivalent to a destructive
account of the things themselves. But after Hume with debonair
clarity pointed out that the analysis of beliefs into sensations
and associations left "natural" ideas and institutions in the
same position in which the reformers had placed "artificial" ones,
the situation changed. The rationalists employed the logic of
sensationalistic-empiricism to show that experience, giving only a heap
of chaotic and isolated particulars, is as fatal to science and to moral
laws and obligations as to obnoxious institutions; and concluded that
"Reason" must be resorted to if experience was to be furnished with any
binding and connecting principles. The new rationalistic idealism of
Kant and his successors seemed to be necessitated by the totally
destructive results of the new empirical philosophy.
Two things have rendered possible a new conception of experience and a
new conception of the relation of reason to experience, or, more
accurately, of the place of reason _in_ experience. The primary factor
is the change that has taken place in the actual nature of experience,
its contents and methods, as it is actually lived. The other is the
development of a psychology based upon biology which makes possible a
new scientific formulation of the nature of experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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