ABSTRACT
England, of course, is the classical land of empiricism, the country of Lord Bacon, J. Locke and D. Hume. From Hume a long succession of English empiricists carried on the tradition unchallenged and unopposed; but this very lack of opposition resulted in sterility and stagnation. The true continuation of Bacon and Hume’s empiricism is to be found in the idealism of I. Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. The Scottish school set itself up as an opponent of the dominant empiricism, which in ethics took from its greatest representative the title of Benthamism. The only living part of the logic of empiricism is its attempt at a description of the genetic process of knowledge. The new tendency of English empiricism is an altogether modern product, and is completely false: it is a scion of the new naturalism—a tendency, utterly opposed to science—grafted on the stock of that old empiricism which bore its fruit not in England but in Germany.
