COMMON BASIS OF EMPIRICISM AND RATIONALISM 51 



by which the ideas of philosophical relation are produced&quot; are 

 properly enough considered as the sources of all philosophical 

 relation.&quot; But these &quot;sources of relation&quot; (comprised under 

 the seven heads of resemblance, identity, etc.) are at once spoken 

 of, and are thereafter referred to, as being themselves relations. 

 This really amounts to saying that relations are their own sources 

 or that the existence and nature of relations are wholly inex 

 plicable in empiricistic terms. Berkeley s partial intuitionalism, 

 crude as it may seem, is surely not less philosophical than this. 



We have dwelt at some length upon the rationalist s inability 

 to pass from the universal to the particular. It is notorious that 

 the empiricist is equally unable except by the covert addition 

 of rationalistic principles to his own to pass from the particular 

 to the universal. For him, as for the rationalist, the contents 

 of sense-perception are mere particulars; and the ascent from 

 the contingent particulars of sense to necessary connections of 

 ideas becomes as impossible as is the rationalist s attempt to 

 deduce particular propositions from the body of universal truth. 

 We may state the case in another way. The datum of knowledge 

 which the empiricist recognizes as immediately given is in the 

 form of individual elements. Hence all terms of thought that 

 are not particular can be only collective. The universality of a 

 concept can mean nothing but the inclusion of every possible 

 particular. It could be reached only by an infinite process of 

 summation and this could never be completed. 



Empiricism, then, starting from what seems to be a position 

 diametrically opposed to the assumption of rationalism, runs into 

 the same logical cul-de-sac in which rationalism has been found 

 to issue. We may well ask: Is the claim that the system of 

 rational knowledge is wholly derived from the contents of sense- 

 perception so far removed, after all, from the contention that its 

 source is to be found only in a priori intuitions of reason? It has 

 been noted, in the first place, that both positions rest on the 

 assumption that experience is analyzable into final elements. 

 The futility of the empiricist s attempt to construct a system 



