Page:Critique of Pure Reason 1855 Meiklejohn tr.djvu/338
Both Epicurus and Plato assert more in their systems than they know. The former encourages and advances science—although to the prejudice of the practical; the latter presents us with excellent principles for the investigation of the practical, but, in relation to everything regarding which we can attain to speculative cognition, permits reason to append idealistic explanations of natural phænomena, to the great injury of physical investigation.
3. In regard to the third motive for the preliminary choice of a party in this war of assertions, it seems very extraordinary that empiricism should be utterly unpopular. We should be inclined to believe, that the common understanding would receive it with pleasure—promising as it does, to satisfy it without passing the bounds of experience and its connected order; while transcendental dogmatism obliges it to rise to conceptions, which far surpass the intelligence and ability of the most practised thinkers. But in this, in truth, is to be found its real motive. For the common understanding thus finds itself in a situation, where not even the most learned can have the advantage of it. If it understands little or nothing about these transcendental conceptions, no one can boast of understanding any more; and although it may not express itself in so scholastically correct a manner as others, it can busy itself with reasoning and arguments without end, wandering among mere ideas, about which one can always be very eloquent, because we know nothing about them; while, in the observation and investigation of nature, it would be forced to remain dumb and to confess its utter igno-
the speculative exercise of reason, he gives evidence therein of a more genuine philosophic spirit than any of the philosophers of antiquity. That, in the explanation of phænomena, we must proceed as if the field of inquiry had neither limits in space nor commencement in time; that we must be satisfied with the teaching of experience in reference to the material of which the world is composed; that we must not look for any other mode of the origination of events than that which is determined by the unalterable laws of nature; and finally, that we must not employ the hypothesis of a cause distinct from the world to account for a phænomenon or for the world itself—are principles for the extension of speculative philosophy, and the discovery of the true sources of the principles of morals, which, however little conformed to in the present day, are undoubtedly correct. At the same time, any one desirous of ignoring, in mere speculation, these dogmatical propositions, need not for that reason be accused of denying them.