Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/341

EMPIRICISM AND RATIONALISM. 319 wholly inactive recipient of messages coming to it from without. From the standpoint of empiricism concepts (Ideas) . deserve confidence only in so far as they can legitimate themselves by their origin in sensations (impressions). It , overlooks the active character of all knowing. Among the rationalists, on the other hand, we find an underestimation of the senses and an overestimation of the understand- ing. They believe that sense reveals only the deceptive exterior of things, while reason gives their true non- ; sensuous essence. That which the mind perceives of things' is deceptive, but that which it thinks concerning them is true. ] The former power is the faculty of confused, the latter the faculty of distinct knowledge. Sense is the enemy rather than the servant of true knowledge, which consists in the development and explication of pregnant innate con- ceptions and principles. These philosophers forget that we can never reach reality by conceptual analysis ; and that the senses have a far greater importance for knowledge than merely to give it an impulse ; that it is they which supply the understanding with real objects, and so with the content of knowledge. Beside the (formal) activity (of the understanding), cognition implies a passive factor, a reception of impressions. Neither sense alone nor the understanding alone produces knowledge, but both cogni- tive powers are necessary, the active and the passive, the conceptual and the intuitive. Here the question arises, How do concept and intuition, sensuous and rational knowledge, differ, and what is the basis of their congruence ? Notwithstanding their different points of departure and their variant results, the two main tendencies of modern philosophy agree in certain points. If the conflict between the two schools and their one-sidedness suggested the idea of supplententing the conclusions of the one by those of the other, the recognition of the incorrectness of their common convictions furnished the occasion to go beyond them and to establish a new, a higher point of view above them both, as also above the eclecticism which sought to unite the opposing principles. The errors common to both concern, in the first place, the nature of judgment and the difference between sensibility and understanding. Neither