Empiricism
Empiricism would be agony if any one was so silly as really to forget his material status and to become the sport of his passing ideas.
Empiricism
In an empirical system causation is reduced to superstition, skipping from fact to observed fact without attempting to penetrate any of them substantially. It attributes to a juxtaposition of appearances a mysterious power to reproduce itself. Unfortunately in immediate experience there are, strictly speaking, no repetitions. The word and occurs often; but never, for actual feeling, in exactly the same context, or with exactly the same emphasis or colour. Empirical philosophy, if sincere, ought to become mystical and to deny that the flux of events has any articulation or method in it.
Empiricism
Belief in law when hasty is called superstition or, when more cautious, empiricism: but the principle in both cases is the same. Both take expectation for probability; and what probability can there be that an expectation, arising at one point, should define a law for the whole universe? . . . . In superstition, as in empiricism, we yield to the vital temptation to ignore reason, and we trust to courage and to whatever idea is uppermost in the mind.
Empiricism
If society does not actually feel or think, actual feeling or thinking, in its turn, is not a society of self-existing 'ideas' or 'perceptions,' as British empiricism would have it.
Dominations '72 at 371 ("Representative Government I: Only Generated Organisms Can Live or Think").
Empiricism
To attribute one phenomenon to the influence of another phenomenon is superstition, or, when defended by philosophers, empiricism.
Idealism
What is idealism? I should like to reply: Thought and love fixed upon essence. If this definition were accepted idealism would be a leavan rather than a system . . . . To arrest attention on pure essence and to be an idealist in a moral or poetic sense, would therefore be possible to a man holding any system of physics. Even a materialist might be a true idealist, if he preferred the study of essence to that of matter or events; but his natural philosophy would keep his poetic ecstasies in their proper place. Such an equilibrium, however, has seldom recommended itself to professed philosophers . . . .
Realms '72 at 382 ("The Realm of Matter: The Latent Materialism of Idealists").
Idealism / Psychologism / Transcendentalism
[By interpreting behaviourism idealistically, we] shall then be brought back to psychologism, the theory which conceives nature to be composed exclusively of various strands of feelings, and thoughts. Psychologism is one of the modern forms of idealism, transcendentalism being the other: and since transcendentalism can escape materialism if it remains a romantic attitude, without any dogmatic cosmology, dogmatic history, dogmatic psychology, or dogmatic memory, so too psychologism may escape materialism if it remains purely literary, like the world of a novel, and when pressed to specify where the existential elements of its literary landscapes are to be found, retires into the citadel of transcendentalism, and says they are found by being feigned, or by being actually experienced. But if transcendentalists find it impossible, in constructing a system, to avoid some dogmatic beliefs, say as to the course of events, the psychologists do not even attempt such rigour; and they take for granted that perfectly well-known experiences fall to everyone's share: that these persons communicate their feelings, know of one another's existence, and receive the same hard knocks at assignable times, without there existing any common environment, any spatial relations, or any connecting medium between their various experiences. Such, at least, would be their doctrine, if they had one . . . .
Materialism
For this reason I have sometimes used the word naturalism instead of materialism to indicate my fundamental belief: but that word is open to even worse equivocations. Naturalism might include psychologism or, as Banfi suggests, it might mean only one moral interest or one logical perspective open to absolute thought. The term materialism seems to me safer . . . . The theoretical sensualist, for instance, who thinks only sensations true or real, is evidently no materialist, but a psychological idealist; else Democritus would be an idealist, in believing in geometrical atoms. He was in fact a rationalist; and in this, to my mind, he was not materialistic enough, because there is ideolatry and conceptual dogmatism in attributing geometrical forms to matter absolutely, simply because they are clear essences to our intuition.
Materialism
There might be said to be as many materialisms as there are stages of discovery in natural science; and the most recent notions, for instance about the disjointed character of minute events, are perfectly materialistic, jumping being as material an act as gliding. What should prevent matter, if it likes, from existing in pulses, and being atomic in time as well as in space? In any case a principle of continuity could not be absent if the separate strokes were not to form entirely separate universes. That existence should be intermittent therefore would add little to the axiom that it is transitory.
Materialism
That matter is capable of eliciting feeling and thought follows necessarily from the principle that matter is the only substance, power, or agency in the universe: and this, not that matter is the only reality, is the first principle of materialism.
Materialism
A materialist is therefore fundamentally a naturalist, and begins, not with any theory of the essence of matter, but with the natural assumption made by children and poets that he is living in an existing and persisting world in which there are rocks and trees, men and animals, feelings and dreams; yet the philosophical naturalist has stopped to observe how these things change and grow, often passing into one another, and eating one another up: so that they suggest to him the belief that something continuous runs through them, makes them up, or causes them to appear. But the appearances are not parts of the material object, since they change with the distance, position, and condition of the observer; often, too, when no such object exists, as in the case of illusions and dreams. If on examination and in the practice of the arts the naturalist thinks this theory verified, he has become a materialist.
Now in denying immaterial agencies, the materialist does not deny that material agencies may be at the same time animated by ideal motives and moral purposes.
Dominations '72 at 18-19 ("Whether Naturalism is Irreligious").
Psychologism
When Descartes, for example, identified matter with extension, he substituted essence for substance . . . . . . . . When he imagined geometrical figures, indistinguishable in scale, parts, or quality, and bounded by merely ideal lines, nevertheless moving in reference to one another, he was substituting a possible pattern of nature for living nature herself. . . . . The only substance remaining in his system—the only being self-existent in all its parts and in actual flux—was accordingly the discourse in which the material world might appear as a picture. Descartes thus became the father of psychologism against his will . . . .
Realms '72 at 159-60 ("The Realm of Essence: Some Kindred Doctrines").
Rationalism
By insisting on the infinity of essence I have, in one sense, already discarded any metaphysical rationalism which should attribute this sort of prior existence and authority to any system of logic or grammar. Essences are prior to existence, but being infinitely various they cannot determine existence to take one form rather than another.
Transcendentalism
A theoretical materialist, who looks on the natural world as on a soil that he has risen from and feeds on, may perhaps feel a certain piety towards those obscure abysses of nature that have given him birth; but his delight will be rather in the clear things of the imagination, in the humanities, by which the rude forces of nature are at once expressed and eluded. Not so the transcendentalist. Regarding his mind as the source of everything, he is moved to solemn silence and piety only before himself: on the other hand, what bewitches him, what he loves to fondle, is his progeny, the material environment, the facts, the laws, the blood, and the iron in which he conceives (quite truly, perhaps) that his spirit perfectly and freely expresses itself. To despise the world and withdraw into the realm of mind, as into a subtler and more congenial sphere, is quite contrary to his idealism. Such a retreat might bring him peace, and he wants war. His idealism teaches him that strife and contradiction, as Heraclitus said, are the parents of all things; and if he stopped striving, if he grew sick of ambition and material goods, he thinks he would be forsaking life, for he hates as he would death what another kind of idealists have called salvation.