12 DOGMATISM AND EVOLUTION 



was incapable of doing it with any consistency. But he made 

 the attempt inevitable to the generation of investigators who 

 followed him. 



The development of English empiricism was carried on in two 

 lines which at first appear to be entirely separate. On the one 

 hand, Mandeville, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Butler attempted 

 in various directions and with varying success to apply the em 

 pirical study of human nature to ethical problems. On the other 

 hand, George Berkeley in his New Theory of Vision a work 

 which marks one of the great turning-points in the history of 

 science formulated with distinctness the method of introspec 

 tion and applied it with unsurpassed acuteness and judgment; 

 and in his Principles of Human Knowledge first claimed for psy 

 chology the highest place among the sciences, subjecting their 

 fundamental conceptions and principles to its final jurisdiction. 

 The two lines of development meet in David Hume. 



The form which the system of empiricism took in Hume s 

 hands may be outlined somewhat as follows. All science must 

 begin with human experience and can never get beyond it. The 

 fundamental science is thus the science of human experience as 

 such; and all explanations whatsoever, if carried back with rigor, 

 must lead us at last to psychological considerations. However, 

 no complete solution of any problem that is to say, no solution 

 in terms that do not themselves constitute new problems is 

 ever possible. Science must be fundamentally inductive. All 

 our reasonings must start from principles of whose ground we 

 have no inkling, but which we assume to be true simply because 

 they appear to be verified by our detailed observations of matter 

 of fact. The limit of explicability is reached in the elementary 

 sensations and feelings, the fainter ideas which copy them, and 

 the observed laws of the association and mutual relations of the 

 elements. No existence over and above our perceptions is con 

 ceivable. The idea of substance is indispensable to common 

 sense, but wholly useless to science except as it may be identi 

 fied with a closely conjoined mass of ideas. The belief in an ex- 



