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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
1. Foreword. Man's every act is an act of faith; generally, an unconscious faith; seldom, an examined faith; never, a faith that by taking thought could have been replaced by assured certainties. All this appears whenever we stop to “rationalize” our conduct. Whatever that conduct may have been, it can be made to appear reasonable only if some propositions are taken to be true, others false. Or, perhaps the more experienced and less exacting mind would feel the reasonableness of its actions to have been as well established as might be, if it could show the premises with which its acts were consistent to be more likely true than false; those with whose truth they were inconsistent, more likely false than true. Either way of putting it points to the one moral; namely, that, apart from incalculable chance, there is nothing but one's judgment in the matter of premises to determine all that one's life can come to know of fruition or frustration. Nothing, then, can be more important to any man than to do all he can to assure the soundness of his reasons for the faith that is in him; i.e. to test the weight of evidence supporting the working hypotheses on which he is willing to act. But to have considered the evidence for the hypotheses on which he has acted or is prepared to act, could be practically useful only to one who had in one way or another come by a sound idea of the evidence on which one should act, if one's actions are not to end in disappointment. The result at which a man's thought on this matter of evidence may have arrived, will constitute his theory of evidence; and the task of constructing the soundest possible theory of evidence is the undertaking of philosophy.
In two parts. The second part will appear in the October issue.
1 Discourse on Method.
2 Euclid, Elements, Post. IV, and Common Notions VII.
3 Principia, 1, 5.
3a Meditations, I (condensed).
4 Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum Carlesianorum. Gerhardt, IV, 354. Leibnitz supposes that the axiom of “two straights” is one of Euclid's. See, however, Stäkl: Gesch. d. Parallelaxioms.
4a Letter, probably to Princess Sophie, against Descartes, Gerhardt, IV, 298. Leibnitz is here speaking of geometry.
5 The feeling of a fallacy in the ontological proof is almost universal; to give accurate expression to the reason for this feeling is not so easy. One of the important historical discussions of the argument is Immanuel Kant's (Kr.d.r.V. B 619ff.) Here it is maintained that the error lies in the premise, Existence is an attribute: “Sein ist offenbar kein reales Predikat, die. ein Begriff von irgend etwas, was zu dem Begriff eines Dinges hinzukommen könne.” (B 626).
6 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1, 1, See. 2 and 8.
7 Essay, II, i, 3–5, selected.
8 Essay II, xii, 1, arranged.
9 Essay II, xii, 2.
10 Helmholtz, Physiologische Optik, 2A, 610f: “nur die Qualitäten der Empfindung als wirkliche Empfindungen zu betrachten sind.
11 The general trend of the “New Theory of Vision” may be indicated by a few of Berkeley's reflections of our perception of distance.—
11. It is plain that distance is in its own nature imperceptible; and yet it is perceived by sight. It remains, therefore, that it be brought into view by means of some other idea that is itself immediately perceived in the act of vision.
16. It being (thus) shown that distance is suggested to the mind by the mediation of some other idea which is itself perceived in the act of seeing, it remains to enquire what ideas or sensations there be that attend vision unto which we may suppose the ideas of distance are connected.
And, first, it is certain by experience that when we look at a near object with both eyes, according as it approaches or recedes from us we alter the disposition of our eyes by lessening or widening the interval between the pupils. This disposition of the eyes is attended with a sensation which seems to me to be that which in this case brings the idea of greater or lesser distance into the mind.
17. Not that there is any natural or necessary connection between the sensation we perceive by the turn of the eyes and greater or lesser distance. But—because the mind has by constant experience found the different sensations corresponding to the different dispositions of the eyes to be attended each with a different degree of distance in the object—there has grown to be an habitual or customary connection between these two sets of ideas.
20. From all which it follows that the judgment we make of the distance of an object viewed with both eyes is entirely the result of experience.
45. And I believe whoever will look narrowly into his own thoughts and examine what he means by saying he sees this or that thing at a distance will agree with me that what he sees only suggests to his understanding that often having passed a certain distance (to be measured by the motion of his body which is perceivable by sense] he shall come to perceive such and such tangible ideas which have been usually connected with such and such visible ideas.
12 Essay II, xxiii, 1.
13 Essay, 2, 23:2.
14 The present study finds that to translate Kant's Ehfahrung by the participle experiencing, or learning by experience, renders the sense in which Kant uses the term better than the usual translation experience.
