ABSTRACT
Immanuel Kant's successors have largely abandoned his faith in an all-explaining reason but they have continued his feud against views that lay more stress on feeling. In recent times, English-speaking philosophers have treated this opposition as a battle between rationalists and empiricists, seeing it as part of a wider epistemological debate about rival sources of knowledge, reason versus experience, a contest that, it seemed, one side might hope eventually to win. Plato, for instance, did not think of reasoning primarily as formal calculation but as a spiritual activity, a practice that could take a man above the delusive tangles of the world and show him the eternal truths. David Hume's reverse formulation of the drama does have the virtue of protesting against the earlier exaltation of thought over feeling. And in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals he does indeed develop a much more positive view than any of his predecessors did about natural human tendencies to goodness.
