Page:Philosophical Review Volume 23.djvu/494

478 a future, partly from the knowledge of the fact that we have forgotten something, and partly from the region of abstract mathematics and logical possibility. We regard our present and past experiences as all parts of one experience, of 'our' experience, through memory of a certain kind. The memory which prolongs our personality backwards in time is the memory of our experiencing, not merely of the things which we experienced. We believe that 'our' total experience is not all-embracing because; (a) there is no logical reason against it, (b) in the logical world there certainly are facts which we do not experience, (c) the common sense assumption, that there are particulars which we do not experience, has been found thoroughly successful as a working hypothesis. 2em

Scepticism is not a doctrine, it is a thought genus, of which there are two species, the scientific, and the ethical-psychological. Franciscus Sanchez is a typical representative of the older scientific scepticism. Primarily he was a physician, and most of his writings are medical; but he also published a "Tractatus Philosophicus. Quod nihil scitur." The question as to whether knowledge is possible is left open; he is only concerned to prove that we know nothing, to the end that the yoke of Aristotelian logic may be thrown off. In eloquent language, he begins with the story of his dissatisfaction with past and present philosophical systems; and while he concludes with a conviction of the impossibility of laying hold upon certain truth, he asserts an untiring purpose to follow after nature by means of hypotheses, although time prove one after the other inadequate. The heart of his scepticism is the unknowability of the thing in itself. For the most part his discussion is a criticism of language in mockery of the scholastic worship of words and definitions. The endless regress of definition, the infinite richness of reality, the inability to image ultimate notions, give the grounds for his assertion that we know nothing. His criticism of the faculty of reason is based upon the propositions, that all knowledge is an organization of sense data, and that these data are untrustworthy. After these proofs that we know nothing, the third part of his treatise, which shows that nothing can be completely known, seems quite superfluous. Here his interest is chiefly theological. He desires to show that as finite creatures we can have no clear and distinct idea of the Creator. The flaw in his argument is his conception of the nature of science. He is not content with the systematization of experience, with truth valid within experience, but insists that we know nothing, since we do not grasp the thing in itself. Yet on the whole, his maintenance of a critical rather than a dogmatic attitude, the insistence on the wherefore with which he concludes, performed a real service in the development of philosophy. 2em