ABSTRACT
My main interest in philosophy has been the growth and development of empiricism in its various forms. All these forms presuppose a distinction between the rational and the empirical, and it is this distinction which I should like to examine here. I need hardly add that the distinction underlies many other systems of thought as well as the empiricist, for it is fundamentally involved in realisms, idealisms, positivisms, and materialisms. It is so much a part of our intellectual inheritance that we tend to take it for granted. Even philosophers who are emphatic about the need for a fresh start, and who make the strongest plea for liberation from past thinking, will frequently be found to have assumed the truth of this distinction and to have rested their philosophy upon it. Yet I venture to think that it needs re-examination and re-appraisal. In what follows I shall attempt to show that the absolute distinction made between the purely rational and the purely empirical can be harmful, however useful less absolute forms may be. I do not deny that the distinction between the rational and the empirical has its uses, but I suspect it in certain of its forms. In treating it here I have in mind considerations of theory of knowledge and metaphysics. It is obvious that the problem affects other philosophical enquiries, particularly ethics. A re-examination of the distinction might prove valuable in our attempts to answer ethical questions but I do not propose to examine these questions here.
