HIS PHILOSOPHICAL POSITION 



of the conservation of energy controlled and directed 

 him in the sphere of physical research. Lotze has 

 finely said, that philosophy is always a piece of life, and 

 that a prolonged philosophical labour is nothing else 

 but the attempt to justify, scientifically, a fundamental 

 view of things which has been adopted in early life. 1 

 This is well illustrated in the case of Helmholtz. 



He early adopted a system of empiricism, and was 

 thus, in a modified sense, a follower of John Locke, the 

 English philosopher who denied the existence of innate 

 ideas. Nothing is in the intellect except what came 

 by sensory impressions, and, to begin with, the mind 

 was a tabula rasa, a blank tablet, ready to receive the 

 inscriptions of the outer world. Knowledge was 

 derived from sensuous perception, or sensation, and 

 partly from internal perception or reflection. Ex- 

 ternal objects were appreciated by the senses, while 

 within there was the apprehension of psychical 

 phenomena by a kind of internal sense. All spatial 

 properties had objective reality, but sensible qualities, 

 such as sound, colour, taste, were in the perceiver and 

 not in the objects themselves. Sensations were signs 

 or symbols, not copies of the external things. They 

 are no more like the real thing than words are like 

 the ideas they represent. In the inner world of mind 

 reflection enables us to know the actions of our 

 willing and thinking faculties. From the two 



1 Philosophy of the Last Forty Years. Contemporary Re-view, Jan. 

 1880. 



251 



