to Hobbes must be given the credit of seeing clearly the nature and 

 necessity of analysis and of suggesting though not fully appreciating 

 the nature and equal, or even greater necessity of synthesis. 



It has already been seen that the mechanistic views advanced 

 by Hobbes were the result of the influence of the special sciences 

 of his day. That motion is the universal cause of all things, was, 

 apparently, for him a self-evident truth. But that motion is the 

 universal cause of all things did not appear to some to be so self- 

 evident. There seemed, at any rate, to be certain facts which were 

 more obviously known than this conclusion. And, in the years 

 succeeding Hobbes' work, discussion centred around the problem of 

 knowledge. Indeed, from Hobbes until Kant, the great problem 

 with which philosophy was concerned was just this problem of 

 knowledge, and here again the real function of philosophy sank into 

 the background. Theories of knowledge, strictly speaking, find a 

 more proper place in the history of psychology than in the history 

 of philosophy, and it is only because, at this time, psychology, as a 

 science, had not become separated out from philosophic investiga- 

 tion and speculation, that Empiricism and Rationalism, as theories 

 of knowledge, deserve to be included in the history of the philosophy 

 of this period. Hobbes had laid emphasis upon the "phantasms 

 of sense and imagination", which, he had said, were the first begin- 

 nings of knowledge; but he likewise had made frequent use of 

 ratiocination or reasoning. This latter, he saw, was extremely 

 important. Without it, science was impossible, for the method of 

 science consisted in just such ratiocination. The distinction 

 between the schools that now arose lies mainly in the emphasis 

 which was placed upon sensation and reason as factors of know- 

 ledge. 



English Empiricism was impressed by the development taking 

 place in the natural sciences. Its aim was to discover the actual 

 facts of experience. But there was a growing tendency to interpret 

 experience as sense experience only. Rationalism, on the other 

 hand, cared little for the mere facts of sensation, and emphasized 

 reason as the enunciator of general principles universally valid. The 

 two schools developed side by side, their conclusions growing more 

 and more at variance, until, with Hume, on one hand, and Leibniz 

 and Wolff, on the other, there arose a state of affairs which seemed 



78 



