What Oxford thinker would dare to print such naif and provincial-sounding citations of authority to-day?

The torch of learning passes from land to land as the spirit bloweth the flame.  The deepening of philosophic consciousness came to us english folk from Germany, as it will probably pass back ere long.  Ferrier, J.H.  Stirling, and, most of all, T.H.  Green are to be thanked.  If asked to tell in broad strokes what the main doctrinal change has been, I should call it a change from the crudity of the older english thinking, its ultra-simplicity of mind, both when it was religious and when it was anti-religious, toward a rationalism derived in the first instance from Germany, but relieved from german technicality and shrillness, and content to suggest, and to remain vague, and to be, in, the english fashion, devout.

By the time T.H.  Green began at Oxford, the generation seemed to feel as if it had fed on the chopped straw of psychology and of associationism long enough, and as if a little vastness, even though it went with vagueness, as of some moist wind from far away, reminding us of our pre-natal sublimity, would be welcome.

Green’s great point of attack was the disconnectedness of the reigning english sensationalism. Relating was the great intellectual activity for him, and the key to this relating was believed by him to lodge itself at last in what most of you know as Kant’s unity of apperception, transformed into a living spirit of the world.

Hence a monism of a devout kind.  In some way we must be fallen angels, one with intelligence as such; and a great disdain for empiricism of the sensationalist sort has always characterized this school of thought, which, on the whole, has reigned supreme at Oxford and in the Scottish universities until the present day.

But now there are signs of its giving way to a wave of revised empiricism.  I confess that I should be glad to see this latest wave prevail; so—­the sooner I am frank about it the better—­I hope to have my voice counted in its favor as one of the results of this lecture-course.

What do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean?  Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes.  Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views.  No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird’s-eye view of the perspective of events.  And the first thing to notice is this, that the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which we have already had experience.  We can invent no new forms of conception, applicable to the whole exclusively, and not suggested originally