ABSTRACT
A nineteenth-century lure of political power, as odd as it may seem, was catalyzed by the earlier British Empiricists. In reply to Continental Rationalism, they held that rationalistic ideas led to dogmatic impositions of a priori metaphysical biases on sense experience. Empiricism was alluring since it stressed experience about which persons might agree. It did not appeal to a metaphysics about which there seemed to be either little agreement or an agreement which, in any event, was empirically unverifiable.
