No doubt Aristotle and the scholastics were often uncritical. They were too intent on building up and buttressing their system on the broad human or religious foundations which they had chosen for it. They nursed the comfortable conviction that whatever their thought contained was eternal and objective truth, a copy of the divine intellect or of the world’s intelligible structure. A sceptic may easily deride that confidence of theirs; their system may have been their system and nothing more. But the way to proceed if we wish to turn our shrewd suspicions and our sense of insecurity into an articulate conviction and to prove that they erred, is to build another system, a more modest one, perhaps, which will grow more spontaneously and inevitably in the mind out of the data of experience. Obviously the rival and critical theory will make the same tacit claim as the other to absolute validity. If all our ideas and perceptions conspire to reinforce the new hypothesis, this will become inevitable and necessary to us. We shall then condemn the other hypothesis, not indeed for having been a hypothesis, which is the common fate of all rational and interpretative thought, but for having been a hypothesis artificial, misleading, and false; one not following necessarily nor intelligibly out of the facts, nor leading to a satisfactory reaction upon them, either in contemplation or in practice.
[Sidenote: Critics disguised enthusiasts.]
Now this is in truth exactly the conviction which those malicious psychologists secretly harboured. Their critical scruples and transcendental qualms covered a robust rebellion against being fooled by authority. They rose to abate abuses among which, as Hobbes said, “the frequency of insignificant speech is one.” Their psychology was not merely a cathartic, but a gospel. Their young criticism was sent into the world to make straight the path of a new positivism, as now, in its old age, it is invoked to keep open the door to superstition. Some of those reformers, like Hobbes and Locke, had at heart the interests of a physical and political mechanism, which they wished to substitute for the cumbrous and irritating constraints of tradition. Their criticism stopped at the frontiers of their practical discontent; they did not care to ask how the belief in matter, space, motion, God, or whatever else still retained their allegiance, could withstand the kind of psychology which, as they conceived, had done away with individual essences and nominal powers. Berkeley, whose interests lay in a different quarter, used the same critical method in support of a different dogmatism; armed with the traditional pietistic theory of Providence he undertook with a light heart to demolish the whole edifice which reason and science had built upon spatial perception. He wished the lay intellect to revert to a pious idiocy in the presence of Nature, lest consideration of her history and laws should breed “mathematical atheists”; and the outer world being thus reduced to a sensuous dream and to the blur of immediate feeling, intelligence and practical faith would be more unremittingly employed upon Christian mythology. Men would be bound to it by a necessary allegiance, there being no longer any rival object left for serious or intelligent consideration.