ABSTRACT
My early philosophic days were cast in Mid-Victorian times, and as was natural to a Mid-Victorian student of philosophy I began my speculative career as a zealous Empiricist. The " Associational School " represented to my youthful mind the quintessence of philosophic wisdom. I swore by Lewes, Bain, Mill, and their colleagues in the popular philosophy of the day. A little later Herbert Spencer captivated me as he did most of my contemporaries, although his reference to Time and Space as products of psychological evolution in a sense puzzled me with the thought what sort of consciousness—what sort of a world—it was that was going on before time and space had evolved or while they were in process of evolution. Spencer's confusion here between the percept of sense with its form and the concept based thereupon by reflection, I was too unsophisticated to grasp at the time. But a hopeless misunderstanding of Kant was characteristic of British Mid-Victorian Empiricism. I next took to the study of Kant at first hand, my chief acquaintance with whom previously had been in the pages of Lewes's History of Philosophy. My thoroughgoing Empiricism suffered a shock, but not sufficient to upset it completely. I nevertheless began to see in Erkenntnisstheorie a " discipline " distinct from the empirical psychology to which I had been accustomed. Newer movements in philosophy of what would be termed an Idealist character now sprang up. They chiefly took the form of expositions of the Kantian and the post-Kantian movement in Germany centering round the so-called " Young Hegelian " school, which at this time (the early eighties) became popular at the English and Scotch Universities. My studies in this direction and my independent thought combined convinced me of the essential superficiality of the empirical view of the Associational School. I saw that mid-nineteenth century Empiricism failed to grasp the fundamental question—What is Reality and what is its meaning?
