ABSTRACT
At the conclusion of an inquiry, recently published, into the course and result of that philosophical movement which is represented by the names of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, the author ventured to speak of the systems of philosophy, which since their time have found favour in England, as anachronistic, and to point by way of contrast to Kant and Hegel, as representing a real advance in metaphysical inquiry. Ideas are the object of the mind in knowing, but ideas, again, are of something, and on their relation to this the nature of the ideas depends. The failure, however, has not been generally recognized. Hume’s natural history of ideas is often referred to as a forecast of the great “discovery,” which, by those who have never understood the real point of the controversy about a priori ideas, is commonly regarded as its final settlement.
