In the second place, the interest in experience as a means of
basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to looking at the
mind as purely receptive. The more passive the mind is, the more
truly objects will impress themselves upon it. For the mind to
take a hand, so to speak, would be for it in the very process of
knowing to vitiate true knowledge -- to defeat its own purpose.
The ideal was a maximum of receptivity. Since the impressions
made upon the mind by objects were generally termed sensations,
empiricism thus became a doctrine of sensationalism -- that is to
say, a doctrine which identified knowledge with the reception and
association of sensory impressions. In John Locke, the most
influential of the empiricists, we find this sensationalism
mitigated by a recognition of certain mental faculties, like
discernment or discrimination, comparison, abstraction, and
generalization which work up the material of sense into definite
and organized forms and which even evolve new ideas on their own
account, such as the fundamental conceptions of morals and
mathematics. (See ante, p. 61.) But some of his successors,
especially in France in the latter part of the eighteenth
century, carried his doctrine to the limit; they regarded
discernment and judgment as peculiar sensations made in us by the
conjoint presence of other sensations. Locke had held that the
mind is a blank piece of paper, or a wax tablet with nothing
engraved on it at birth (a tabula rasa) so far as any contents of
ideas were concerned, but had endowed it with activities to be
exercised upon the material received.
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