Empiricism

(Lat. empirismus, the standpoint of a system based on experience)

Primarily, and in its psychological application, the term signifies the theory that

the phenomena of consciousness are simply the product of sensuous

experience, i.e. of sensations variously associated and arranged. It is thus

distinguished from Nativism or Innatism. Secondarily, and in its logical

(epistemological) usage, it designates the theory that all human knowledge is

derived exclusively from experience, the latter term meaning, either explicitly or

implicitly, external sense-percepts and internal representations and inferences

exclusive of any superorganic (immaterial) intellectual factor. In this connection it

is opposed to Intellectualism, Rationalism, Apriorism. The two usages evidently

designate but two inseparable aspects of one and the same theory the

epistemological being the application of the psychological to the problem of

knowledge.

Empiricism appears in the history of philosophy in three principal forms: (1)

Materialism, (2) Sensism, and (3) Positivism.

(1) Materialism

Materialism in its crudest shape was taught by the ancient atomists

(Democritus, Leucippus, Epicurus, Lucretius), who, reducing the sum of all

reality to atoms and motion, taught that experience, whereof they held

knowledge to be constituted, is generated by images reflected from material

objects through the sensory organs into the soul. The soul, a mere complexus of

the finest atoms, perceives not the objects but their effluent images. With

modern materialists (Helvetius, d'Holbach, Diderot, Feuerbach, Moleschott,

Büchner, Vogt, etc.), knowledge is accounted for either by cerebral secretion or

by motion; while Häcket looks on it as a physiological process effected by

certain brain cells. Avenarius, Willy, Mach, etc. subtilize this process so far as

to reduce all experience to internal (empirio-criticism).

(2) Sensism

All materialists are of course sensists. Though the converse is not the case,

nevertheless, by denying any essential difference between sensations and ideas

(intellectual states), sensism logically involves materialism. Sensism, which is

found with Empedocles and Protagoras amongst the ancients, was given its first

systematic form by Locke (d. 1704), though Bacon (d. 1626) and Hobbes (d.

l679) had prepared the data. Locke derives all simple ideas from external

experience (sensations), all compound ideas (modes, substances, relations)

from internal experience (reflection). Substance and cause are simply

associations of subjective phenomena; universal ideas are mere mental figments.

Locke admits the existence, though he denies the demonstrability, in man of an

immaterial and immortal principle, the soul. Berkeley (d. 1753), accepting the

teaching of Locke that ideas are only transfigured sensations, subjectivizes not

only the sensible or secondary qualities of matter (sensibilia propria, e.g. colour

and sound) as his predecessor had done, but also the primary qualities

(sensibilia communia, extension, space, etc.), which Locke held to be objective.

Berkeley denies the objective basis of universal ideas and indeed of the whole

material universe. The reality of things he places in their being perceived (esse rei

est percipi), and this "perceivedness" is effected in the mind by God, not by the

object or subject. He still retains the substance-reality of the human soul and of

spirits generally, God included. Hume (d. 1776) agrees with his two empiricist

predecessors in teaching that the mind knows only its own subjective organic

impressions, whereof ideas are but the images. The supersensible is therefore

unknowable; the principle of causality is resolved into a mere feeling of

successiveness of phenomena; its necessity is reduced to a subjective feeling

resulting from uniform association experienced in consciousness, and the

spiritual essence or substantial being of the soul is dissipated into a series of

conscious states. Locke's sensism was taken up by Condillac (d. 1780), who

eliminated entirely the subjective factor (Locke's "reflection") and sought to

explain all cognitional states by a mere mechanical, passive transformation of

external sensations. The French sensist retained the spiritual soul, but his

followers disposed of it as Hume had done with the Berkeleian soul relic. The

Herbartians confound the image with the idea, nor does Wundt make a clear

distinction between primitive concepts (empirische Begriffe, representations of

individual objects) and the image: "Denken ist Phantasieren in Begriffen und

Phantasieren ist Denken in Bildern".

(3) Positivism

Positivists, following Comte (d. 1857), do not deny the supersensible; they

declare it unknowable; the one source of cognition, they claim, is

sense-experience, experiment, and induction from phenomena. John Stuart Mill

(d. 1870), following Hume, reduces all knowledge to series of conscious states

linked by empirical associations and enlarged by inductive processes. The mind

has no certitude of an external world, but only of "a permanent possibility of

sensations" and antecedent and anticipated feelings. Spencer (d. 1903) makes

all knowledge relative. The actual existence of things is their persistence in

consciousness. Consciousness contains only subjective feelings. The relative

supposes the absolute, but the latter is unknowable to us; it is the object of faith

and religion (Agnosticism). All things, mind included, have resulted from a

cosmical process of mechanical evolution wherein they are still involved; hence

all concepts and principles are in a continuous flux.

THE TEACHING OF CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY

Catholic Philosophy teaches that sense-experience is a source, and indeed the

primary source, of human knowledge, but it holds that there are other sources

beyond sensations. There is nothing in the intellect that had not its birth in

sense; this is one of the generalizations of the School. Moreover, though every

intellectual act is accompanied by sensory motion, and especially by some

sense representation (phantasma) evoked in the imagination, nevertheless

sensation and sensuous representation (phantasma, image) differ essentially

from the idea produced in and by the intellect, which is an immaterial,

supersensuous and superorganic power or faculty. The theory here proposed

may be called empirico-intellectualism since it conjoins a sensuous factor with

the purely intellectual or immaterial agency in the genesis of knowledge. Its

bases are as follows:

Ideas represent the natures or essences of things, not the mere sensuous

qualities, the phenomena of things, but the underlying subject and cause

thereof, e.g. substance, life, cause, truth, etc.; while ideas of sensuous

qualities as such represent them in the abstract and as universal, e.g.

light.

The mind possesses ideas of things (substances and accidents)

immaterial, invisible, possible, and impossible, etc., e.g. ideas of God,

spirit, etc.--ideas which cannot be formed from purely sensuous

presentations or images.

we make clear-cut distinctions between the essential and accidental or

contingent properties and attributes of things.

Every predicate idea represents not a congeries of sensuous qualities, but

what the subject is (its essence), under some particular aspect.

Now none of these peculiarities of the idea can be discovered in any sensation or

image, which always represents sensuous phenomena, existent and concrete.

Locke's "reflection" and Condillac's "processes of association" will not suffice to

transmute sensations into ideas, since these two states are essentially,

because objectively (representatively), different. Positivists inadvertently slip in an

immaterial agency, whereby indeed they beg the question when they appeal to

induction to explain the genesis of knowledge; the inductive process involves

universal abstract principles and logical laws which are constituted of ideas that

essentially transcend sensations. The supersensuous character of ideas follows

equally from their "extension" or range of applicability. Ideas as representative of

essences, are available as predicates, and are the terms whereof absolutely

universal principles are constituted. Hence ideas are universal, whereas

sensations and images can represent only objects that affect the sensory

organs, i.e. individual, physically existing objects. Moreover, ideas represent

objects as abstract--physically abstract, e.g. individual sensible qualities;

mathematically abstract, e.g. extension and number; metaphysically abstract,

e.g. nature, entity, substance, truth, etc. And indeed unless ideas were of the

abstract there could be no science, physical, mathematical, or philosophical; all

these sciences consider their objects apart from concrete individual

determinations. No intellectual judgment whatsoever would be possible, since

every predicate is a generalized term and hence in some degree abstract.

Sensation cannot represent an abstract object; for though the sight, e.g.,

perceives colour apart from sound, nevertheless

no sense can abstract from the subject-matter--from the existence and

individuality of its proper object; the eye does not see colour as such and

abstracted, but the coloured object physically and individually existing;

no sense can abstract from its proper object (its appropriate stimulus or

object-quality), nor from its common object (quantity, the extended

object);

a fortiori, no sense can perceive one dimension of extension or a

mathematical point, or things non-existent, or abstract forms like man and

humanity.

Nor does the common image suffice to explain the universal idea as Locke and

the Herbartians suppose, for the common image, though indistinct, remains

always in some way concrete and sensible; since the imagination as primarily

reproductive can represent only what the senses have reported. Consciousness

attests this; for if the imagination represent e.g. a triangle, it is always of some

certain size and shape; it cannot represent a triangle which is neither

rectangular, obtuse, nor acute; while the idea of a triangle prescinds from every

size or shape. Besides the image there is therefore the thought, the intellectual

concept, the latter differing essentially from the former. Hence the common

image is not predicable of the individuals distributively because it is still

somehow concrete, singular, sensible, material, and represents only quality. Nor

can it be predicated as confusedly blending all its inferiors, because the

predicate of a judgment is attributed according to comprehension rather than

extension. At best, moreover, the image is like to things; the concept is identical

with the subject of which it is predicated. According to the empiricists the

common image results from a comparison of representations, so that what is

common to them, i.e. some pre-eminent quality, stands as the concept. But the

intellect would thus have to immediately perceive and compare the images,

which is impossible; nor could it form a concept unless a number of sense

perceptions and representations of a thing or things of the same species had

preceded. We know, however, that we immediately form a concept of a thing,

even though perceived but once. Furthermore, in order to form the common

image a concept of the object must have preceded; for in order to compare

similar things we must previously have perceived their likeness. Now, to perceive

their likeness means to perceive some common objective aspect wherein the

similar things agree, while differing in other aspects. But this the senses cannot

perceive; hence there must precede an intellectual perception of the note of

agreement common to the objects represented by the images, i.e. a universal

idea must precede the common image. The common image therefore does not

precede but follows the common concept, whereof it is a sort of shadow. This is

specially so in the case of the productive imagination which re-arranges in new

forms previously compared images and hence supposes reflection and judgment,

operations which no sense call perform.

Sensism implies scepticism.

For if we do not immediately perceive external objects but only our

subjective sensuous modifications, then, since these differ with different

individuals (e.g. the varying judgments of distance, heat, cold, etc., which

varying judgments require intellectual correction whereof the senses are

incapable), there could be no certain and objective truth, each individual

would be the measure of truth, there would be no objective criterion of

certitude, no universal truths.

In order to pass from a subjective affection to a knowledge of its object we

must employ the principle of causality. Now, in sensism, either the

concept of cause is not objective or cause is not perceived at all; therefore

the principle of causality is either rejected or is pronounced doubtful.

Hence there can be no certitude of the objective existence of things.

Hume was but logical when he deduced universal scepticism from the

theory of Locke.

Sensism involves the destruction of all science.

Science is the knowledge of things in and by their causes; but the senses

cannot perceive causes.

Positivists claim that by their method the sciences have made wonderful

progress, that by employing observation and induction the laws of nature

have been discovered. Now, observation of phenomena entails universal

ideas whereby the phenomena are classified under groups or species,

while induction, to be legitimate and certain, postulates the principle of

causality. Therefore the physical sciences suppose physical abstraction;

the mathematical, mathematical abstraction, the metaphysical,

metaphysical abstraction (primitive, i.e. direct, and reflective; ontological,

logical, psychological). The negation of universal, necessary, immutable

ideas essentially different from sensations means the destruction of even

physical science, a fortiori of mathematical and philosophical sciences.

Sensism destroys the foundations of morality and religion. For, as sensists and

positivists admit, their theories leave no proof of the soul's spirituality and

immortality; of the existence of moral law, its obligation and sanction in a future

life; of the existence of God and His relation to man. Now, history bears witness

that these truths are fundamental for man's religious and moral life.

F .P. Siegfried

Transcribed by Rick McCarty

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume V

Nihil Obstat, May 1, 1909. Remy Lafort, Censor

Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York

The Catholic Encyclopedia: NewAdvent.org