They were not empiricists, but very practical men.

The old empiricist view, as typified by Mill, was that the mind had been impressed with all its principles, such as the truths of arithmetic, the axioms of geometry, and the law of causation, by an uncontradicted course of experience, until it generalized facts into 'laws,' and was enabled to predict a similar future with certainty.

The empiricists merely collect, like the ants; the dogmatic metaphysicians spin the web of their ideas out of themselves, like the spiders; but the true philosopher must be like the bee, which by its own power transforms and digests the gathered material.

Descartes, the rationalist, had despised experience, and Bacon, the empiricist, had despised mathematics; but Locke aims to show that while the reason is the instrument of science, demonstration its form, and the realm of knowledge wider than experience, yet this instrument and this form are dependent for their content on a supply of material from the senses.

In his moral philosophy Hume shows himself the empiricist only, not the skeptic.

The empiricists described it as a process of comparison and discrimination, as the mere perception and recognition of the relations and connections already existing between ideas; while in reality judgment does not discover the relations and connections of representations, but itself establishes them.

The empiricist considers thought transformed, sublimated perception, while the rationalist sees in perception only confused and less distinct thought.

Rationalists and empiricists alike have been deceived in regard to the necessity for co-operation between the senses and the understanding.

The empiricists hold to the result, while they either weaken or completely misunderstand the rationalism of the method: the a priori factor, says Fries, was not reached by a priori, but by a posteriori, means, and there is no other way by which it could have been reached.

K'ang was a scholar who belonged to the empiricist school of philosophy of the early Manchu period, the so-called Han school.

From this point, however, he diverges widely from Herbert Spencer and the other English empiricists.

The tone of Fechner's empiricist pantheism contrasted with that of the rationalistic sort, 144.

Empiricist minds, putting the parts before the whole, appear to rationalists, who start from the whole, and consequently enjoy magniloquent privileges, to use epithets offensively diminutive.

But all such differences are minor matters which ought to be subordinated in view of the fact that, whether we be empiricists or rationalists, we are, ourselves, parts of the universe and share the same one deep concern in its destinies.

If we are empiricists and go from parts to wholes, we believe that beings may first exist and feed so to speak on their own existence, and then secondarily become known to one another.

Advance in thinking, in the hegelian universe, has, in short, to proceed by the apodictic words must be rather than by those inferior hypothetic words may be, which are all that empiricists can use.

Simply and innocently affirmative statements are good enough for empiricists, but unfit for rationalist use, lying open as they do to every accidental contradictor, and exposed to every puff of doubt.

Not only empiricists, but absolutists also, would all, if they were as candid as this author, confess that the prime thing in their philosophy is their vision of a truth possible, which they then employ their reasoning to convert, as best it can, into a certainty or probability.

In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite of Protagoras, Hume, and James Mill, rationalism has never been seriously questioned, for its sharpest critics have always had a tender place in their hearts for it, and have obeyed some of its mandates.

Pluralistic empiricists, on the other hand, have remained in the world of sense, either naïvely and because they overlooked the intellectualistic contradictions, or because, not able to ignore them, they thought they could refute them by a superior use of the same intellectualistic logic.

Both sides treat it as authoritative, but they do so capriciously: the absolutists smashing the world of sense by its means, the empiricists smashing the absolutefor the absolute, they say, is the quintessence of all logical contradictions.

The empiricists use their logic against the absolute, but refuse to use it against finite experience.

This is what in some recent writings of mine I have called the 'radically empiricist' doctrine (in distinction from the doctrine of mental atoms which the name empiricism so often suggests).

As an empiricist you cannot say so, for you have just declared activity to be only a kind of synthetic object, or conjunctive relation experienced between bits of experience already made.

He was an empiricist, with a touch of pragmatismthough he did not know it.