Empiricism
Requiring every idea about the world to measure itself against experience: observation, not speculation, is what puts our beliefs to the test.
1620 – 1776
A major current of British philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries, classical empiricism answers a question of epistemology: where does the mind get its content, and how far can knowledge reach? Heralded by Francis Bacon's experimental method, it takes shape with 's (1689), which sets out to inventory the origin and bounds of the understanding, is then radicalised into 's idealism, and culminates in 's analysis, which extends the method to impressions and their ideas. Its method is regressive analysis: trace every notion back to the experience it derives from, on pain of judging it empty. The school is built as a reply to the continental of and , accompanies the rise of experimental natural philosophy, and wakes , who said he owed to it his escape from his « dogmatic slumber » before seeking its synthesis with rationalism. Its legacy runs to the logical empiricism of the 20th century and to the analysis of language.
No idea is innate: every content of the mind can be traced back to an impression of sensation or reflection, and whatever does not so derive is empty.
The world is not deduced from first principles: one rises from the observed fact to general laws by induction, and every axiom stays revisable by experience.
Only particular perceptions exist: generality is a fact of language, a name grouping likes, not an essence in things.
Knowledge drawn from the senses cannot be demonstrative: matters of fact stay probable, and to own that limit is better than to feign it away.
Introspection yields no soul-substance: the self is but a continuity of memory and consciousness, a bundle of perceptions in flux.
Justification
The lever is a genetic argument: trace any idea back to its source and one finds only an impression of sensation or reflection, never a content given in advance. Locke opens the by demolishing the universal-consent argument advanced for (no principle is known to children or idiots), which leaves the mind as white paper to be furnished; Hume sharpens the criterion into a polemical weapon, demanding that one exhibit the impression a term derives from, failing which it is empty of meaning. This is the exact reversal of 's , which made the innate idea the bedrock of knowledge.
Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: how comes it to be furnished? ... To this I answer, in one word, from experience.Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, ch. 1, §2
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book I (against innate ideas) and II, 1 · Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section II
Justification
Drawing all knowledge from experience forces one to accept its precariousness: what comes only from the senses cannot carry the necessity of a demonstration. Locke therefore confines certain knowledge to a narrow domain and files the rest under mere probability, and Hume strikes the decisive blow by showing that matters of fact rest on induction, which presupposes without being able to prove that the future will resemble the past. This lucidity about the limits of understanding sets the school against the rationalist claim to a complete deductive system, yet without lapsing into : its stays mitigated, corrective rather than destructive.
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book IV · Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sections IV and XII
Justification
Since nothing is in the mind that was not first in the senses, the method can only be regressive then ascending: one starts from the observable given and rises to general laws by induction, never the reverse. Bacon erects this march into a rule, denouncing the hasty anticipation that imposes a priori principles on nature, and sets against it methodical induction, conducted through tables of absence and presence. This is the overturning of the rationalist model, which deduced the world from self-evident first truths: here axioms do not precede experience, they are its revisable outcome.
Locke, Essay; Hume, Enquiry; Bacon, Novum Organum
Justification
Nominalism follows directly from the sensory origin of ideas: every perception is of a particular, this triangle, this shade, never of a universal in general, which therefore has no corresponding idea in the mind. Locke still admitted abstract ideas obtained by separation; objects that one cannot form the idea of a triangle that is neither equilateral nor scalene, and reduces the general to a sign standing in for all its likes. Generality thus passes into language, not into things, which dismisses Forms and realist essences as entities with no purchase in experience.
Locke, Essay, III; Hume, Treatise, I, I, 7
Justification
The school makes the regulation of assent an epistemic duty: Locke holds that one should give one's assent in proportion to the evidence and the degrees of probability, and Hume sums up this ethics of belief in his famous maxim about the wise man who proportions his belief to the evidence. To ground knowledge in experience is to require believing only to the measure of what experience attests.
A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect. X
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, 15-16 (of probability and the degrees of assent) · Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section X (of miracles)
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Justification
The school is allied with experimental natural philosophy: Bacon sets out its inductive method, and Locke calls himself the humble under-labourer clearing the ground for the Newtons of his age. The most secure knowledge is that drawn from observation and experiment, which places the school on the side favourable to the authority of science.
Bacon, Novum Organum, book II (induction) · Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, epistle to the reader
Justification
Empiricism conceives of science as knowledge of observable regularities rather than of the inner nature of things: Locke holds the real essence of bodies to be beyond our reach and grants only a nominal essence, framed by the mind, to the kinds we sort things into. Berkeley, the third great figure of the school, radicalises this primacy of experience into idealism: for him esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, and bodies are but collections of sensible ideas, which dismisses unintelligible matter without threatening the science of phenomena. The position leans toward a sober realism, anchored in experience, without claiming to grasp essences.
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III, 6 and IV, 3 (real and nominal essence) · Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, §3 and §9 (esse est percipi, against matter) · Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section IV
Justification
Empiricism refers the truth of matters of fact to the agreement of our ideas with what experience presents: Locke defines knowledge as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of our ideas, and the ultimate tribunal of any assertion about the world remains observation. This conception, dominated by correspondence to experience, stays typical beyond the divergences over the nature of the things perceived.
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, 1 and IV, 5 (of knowledge and of truth) · Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section IV (relations of ideas and matters of fact)
Justification
Applying the school's rule to the self, admit nothing whose idea experience does not supply, suffices to dissolve the Cartesian soul-substance: introspection never yields the thinking substance, only successive states. Locke concludes that rests not on a substance but on the continuity of memory and consciousness, prising the person loose from the metaphysical soul; Hume, finding within himself only a bundle of perceptions in perpetual flux, denies any substantial self. Against 's res cogitans, posited as the first certainty, the subject becomes a fact to be reconstructed, not an assured starting point.
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, 27 (of identity and diversity) · Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, I, 4, 6 (of personal identity)
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Justification
Moral empiricism, with Hume, measures good and evil by usefulness and agreeableness: suffering is an evil that benevolence moves us to relieve, and the pain one inflicts on oneself without profit, through mortification, is only a vice. No fruitfulness is granted to sought-out suffering; sensibility commands reducing it.
Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, IX
Justification
Empiricism reads in experience no providential end, and holds the argument from design to be fragile (Hume). Meaning is therefore not given but found at human scale: in pleasures, social affections, useful activity and virtue. An immanent, revisable significance, attuned to what experience shows, without anguish or beyond.
Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion · Mill, Utilitarianism
Justification
Moral empiricism, from Hume to the utilitarians, measures the good life by experience: a balanced blend of pleasures, useful activity and agreeable relations. Virtue is worth its effects, its utility and agreeableness, not worthwhile in itself; the asceticism that sacrifices sensible happiness is rejected as contrary to nature.
Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals · Mill, Utilitarianism
Justification
Empiricism holds the passions and desires to be the natural springs of action, to be understood as facts rather than condemned. Far from asceticism, the point is to satisfy and to govern them through experience and judgment, which distinguish desires by their effects: a naturalistic affirmation tempered by a prudent sorting.
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, II · Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, 21
Justification
Empiricism undoes essences: we know only nominal essences, our classifications, not the real nature of things (Locke), and the self is but a bundle of perceptions (Hume). The newborn mind is a blank page, so that what a person becomes owes to experience, not to an innate nature, though without a free self-fashioning.
Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, III, 3 · Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I, 4
Justification
Empiricism leans toward compatibilism: freedom is not a will withdrawn from causes, but the power to act according to one's own desires without external constraint. Hume shows that this liberty of action is not only compatible with causal necessity but requires it, for without regular ties between motives and acts there would be neither character nor accountability. The dispute over free will then rests on a confusion of words more than on a genuine mystery.
Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, VIII · Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, 21
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Justification
By anchoring morality in sentiment and experience rather than in universal reason, the school relativises moral foundations. It is Hume in particular who derives the virtues from their felt usefulness and agreeableness and treats justice as an artificial virtue born of convention rather than of a given nature. The weighting blends a core of human constants with a large share of relativity and social construction.
Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, sections III and V · Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, III, 2 (of justice as an artificial virtue)
Justification
Moral sentimentalism is here chiefly Hume's work: it is passion, not understanding, that moves us to act and grounds moral distinctions, which rest on a sentiment of approval or blame. This leaning, already foreshadowed by British moral-sense philosophy, is typical of the school without being shared identically by Locke.
Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.A Treatise of Human Nature, II, 3, 3
Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, II, 3, 3 and III, 1
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Justification
Empiricism accompanies the rising mechanistic science and distrusts Aristotelian final causes, which Bacon ranks among the idols that sterilise inquiry. Hume goes further, analysing causal connection itself as a custom of the mind projected onto the regular conjunction of phenomena, which rules out any intrinsic finalism.
Bacon, Novum Organum, I, aphorisms 38-51 (the idols, against final causes) · Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section VII
Justification
If the mind is at birth a , then character, ideas, and mores are formed by experience, education, and habit. Locke draws from this an entire pedagogy in which people become what education makes them, tilting the school toward cultural shaping rather than a fixed innate nature.
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §1 · Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, 1