TWO THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 



by the leaders of scientific discovery, this was 

 the conception of Nature which inspired and sus- 

 tained the scientific advance. In the department 

 of philosophic speculation, however, it appeared 

 only under the debased and misleading form of 

 a belief that the sensible presentation was the true 

 source of the contents of Cognition, that it was 

 from Sensation that the Mind of Man derived the 

 whole fabric of Science. " Penser c'est sentir" was 

 the form in which it was expressed by Condillac, 

 but was equally the view which commended 

 itself to Berkeley, at least in his early writings, to 

 Hume, and to a whole army of successors down to 

 J. S. Mill. 



We hope we have already sufficiently emphasised 

 the falsity of such a view. Obviously, if the Mind 

 were merely the passive recipient of a stream of 

 impressions, no sort of rational Discourse, no 

 scientific or cognitive effort could ever have been 

 stimulated into activity, and the very ideas of 

 causality and relation, indeed all that we associate 

 with the exercise of the understanding, could never 

 have been called into being. 



Upon neither of these views of the nature of 

 Knowledge can we arrive at any consistent or 

 intelligible conception of its genesis, nature, or 

 method of operation. 



