| However rude the religious conceptions generated by the remains of the old manners and customs of a less cultivated time, the intelligent classes were not thereby prevented from devoting themselves to free inquiry into the existence and nature of God; and they easily saw that there could be no surer way of pleasing the invisible ruler of the world, and of attaining to happiness in another world at least, than a good and honest course of life in this. |
| Thus theology and morals formed the two chief motives, or rather the points of attraction in all abstract inquiries. |
| But it was the former that especially occupied the attention of speculative reason, and which afterwards became so celebrated under the name of metaphysics. |
| I shall not at present indicate the periods of time at which the greatest changes in metaphysics took place, but shall merely give a hasty sketch of the different ideas which occasioned the most important revolutions in this sphere of thought. |
| There are three different ends in relation to which these revolutions have taken place. |
| 1. In relation to the object of the cognition of reason, philosophers may be divided into sensualists and intellectualists. |
| Epicurus may be regarded as the head of the former, Plato of the latter. |
| The distinction here signalized, subtle as it is, dates from the earliest times, and was long maintained. |
| The former asserted that reality resides in sensuous objects alone, and that everything else is merely imaginary; the latter, that the senses are the parents of illusion and that truth is to be found in the understanding alone. |
| The former did not deny to the conceptions of the understanding a certain kind of reality; but with them it was merely logical, with the others it was mystical. |
| The former admitted intellectual conceptions, but declared that sensuous objects alone possessed real existence. |
| The latter maintained that all real objects were intelligible, and believed that the pure understanding possessed a faculty of intuition apart from sense, which, in their opinion, served only to confuse the ideas of the understanding. |
| 2. In relation to the origin of the pure cognitions of reason, we find one school maintaining that they are derived entirely from experience, and another that they have their origin in reason alone. |
| Aristotle may be regarded as the bead of the empiricists, and Plato of the noologists. |
| Locke, the follower of Aristotle in modern times, and Leibnitz of Plato (although he cannot be said to have imitated him in his mysticism), have not been able to bring this question to a settled conclusion. |
| The procedure of Epicurus in his sensual system, in which he always restricted his conclusions to the sphere of experience, was much more consequent than that of Aristotle and Locke. |
| The latter especially, after having derived all the conceptions and principles of the mind from experience, goes so far, in the employment of these conceptions and principles, as to maintain that we can prove the existence of God and the existence of God and the immortality of them objects lying beyond the soul--both of them of possible experience--with the same force of demonstration as any mathematical proposition. |
| 3. In relation to method. |
| Method is procedure according to principles. |
| We may divide the methods at present employed in the field of inquiry into the naturalistic and the scientific. |
| The naturalist of pure reason lays it down as his principle that common reason, without the aid of science--which he calls sound reason, or common sense--can give a more satisfactory answer to the most important questions of metaphysics than speculation is able to do. |