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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 (1632-1704) 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 in 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 Nouvelle Héloise had its counterpart in the philosophic exaltation of instinct and feeling above intellect and reason. How does knowledge arise? Have we, as some good people suppose, innate ideas, as, for example, of right and wrong, and God,―ideas inherent in the mind from birth, prior to all experience? Anxious theologians, worried lest belief in the Deity should disappear because God had not yet been seen in any telescope, had thought that faith and morals might be strengthened if their central and basic ideas were 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." mind is at birth a clean sheet, a tabula rasa; and senseexperience writes upon it in a thousand ways, until sensation

The

Did he

say that ?

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begets memory and memory begets ideas. All of which
seemed to lead to the startling conclusion that since only ma-
terial 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
Loche's conclusion,

Not at all, said Bishop George Berkeley (1684–1753);
this Lockian analysis of knowledge proves rather that matter
does not exist except as a form of mind. It was a brilliant
idea to refute materialism by the simple expedient of show-
ing that we know of no such thing as matter; in all Europe
only a Gaelic imagination could have conceived this meta-
physical magic. But see how obvious it is, said the Bishop:
has not Locke told us that all our knowledge is derived from
sensation? Therefore all our knowledge of anything is
merely our sensations of it, and the ideas derived from these
sensations. A "thing" is merely a bundle of perceptions-
i. e., classified and interpreted sensations. You protest that
your breakfast is much more substantial than a bundle of
perceptions; and that a hammer that teaches you carpentry
through your thumb has a most magnificent materiality.
But your breakfast is at first nothing but a congeries of
sensations of sight and smell and touch; and then of taste;
and then of internal comfort and warmth. Likewise, the
hammer is a bundle of sensations of color, size, shape, weight,
touch, etc.; its reality for you is not in its materiality, but in
the sensations that come from your thumb. If you had no
senses, the hammer would not exist for you at all; it might
strike your dead thumb forever and yet win from you not the
slightest attention. It is only a bundle of sensations, or a
bundle of memories; it is a condition of the mind. All
matter, so far as we know it, is a mental condition; and the
only reality that we know directly is mind. So much for
materialism.

But the Irish Bishop had reckoned without the Scotch sceptic. David Hume (1711-1776) at the age of twenty

six shocked all Christendom with his highly heretical Treatise on Human Nature,-one of the classics and marvels of modern philosophy. We know the mind, said Hume, only as know matter: by perception, though it be in this case internal. Never do we perceive any such entity as the "mind"; we perceive merely separate ideas, memories, feelings, etc. The mind is not a substance, an organ that has ideas; it is only an abstract name for the series of ideas; the perceptions, memories and feelings are the mind; there is no observable "soul" behind the processes of thought. The result appeared to be that Hume had as effectually destroyed mind as Berkeley had destroyed matter. Nothing was left; and philosophy found itself in the midst of ruins of its own making. No wonder that a wit advised the abandonment of the controversy, saying: "No matter, never mind."

But Hume was not content to destroy orthodox religion by dissipating the concept of soul; he proposed also to destroy science by dissolving the concept of law. Science and philosophy alike, since Bruno and Galileo, had been making much of natural law, of "necessity" in the sequence of effect upon cause; Spinoza had reared his majestic metaphysics upon this proud conception. But observe, said Hume, that we never perceive causes, or laws; we perceive events and sequences, and infer causation and necessity; a law is not an eternal and necessary decree to which events are subjected, but merely a mental summary and shorthand of our kaleidoscopic experience; we have no guarantee that the sequences hitherto observed will re-appear unaltered in future experience. "Law” is an observed custom in the sequence of events; but there is no "necessity" in custom.

Only mathematical formulas have necessity-they alone are inherently and unchangeably true; and this merely because such formulae are tautological-the predicate is already contained in the subject; "3 × 3 = 9" is an eternal and necessary truth only because "3 X 3" and "9" are one and the same thing differently expressed; the predicate adds nothing to

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the subject. Science, then, must limit itself strictly to mathematics and direct experiment; it cannot trust to unverified deduction from "laws." "When we run through libraries, persuaded of these principles," writes our uncanny sceptic, "what havoc must we make! If we take in our hands any volume of school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, 'Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?' No. 'Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?' No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

Imagine how the ears of the orthodox tingled at these words. Here the epistemological tradition-the inquiry into the nature, sources, and validity of knowledge-had ceased to be a support to religion; the sword with which Bishop Berkeley had slain the dragon of materialism had turned against the immaterial mind and the immortal soul; and in the turmoil science itself had suffered severe injury. No wonder that when Immanuel Kant, in 1775, read a German translation of the works of David Hume, he was shocked by these results, and was roused, as he said, from the "dogmatic slumber" in which he had assumed without question the essentials of religion and the bases of science. Were both science and faith to be surrendered to the sceptic? What could be done to save them?

3. From Rousseau to Kant

To the argument of the Enlightenment, that reason makes for materialism, Berkeley had essayed the answer that matter does not exist. But this had led, in Hume, to the retort that by the same token mind does not exist either. Another answer was possible-that reason is no final test. There are some theoretical conclusions against which our whole being rebels; we have no right to presume that these demands of our nature must be stifled at the dictates of a logic which is after

1 Quoted in Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, Boston, 1892; p. 98.