ast
chance trials. Reason meant the principle of reform, of progress, of
increase of control. Devotion to the cause of reason meant breaking
through the limitations of custom and getting at things as they really
were. To the modern reformers, the situation was the other way around.
Reason, universal principles, a priori notions, meant either blank forms
which had to be filled in by experience, by sense observations, in
order to get significance and validity; or else were mere indurated
prejudices, dogmas imposed by authority, which masqueraded and found
protection under august names. The great need was to break way from
captivity to conceptions which, as Bacon put it, "anticipated nature"
and imposed merely human opinions upon her, and to resort to experience
to find out what nature was like. Appeal to experience marked the breach
with authority. It meant openness to new impressions; eagerness
in discovery and invention instead of absorption in tabulating and
systematizing received ideas and "proving" them by means of the
relations they sustained to one another. It was the irruption into the
mind of the things as they really were, free from the veil cast over
them by preconceived ideas.

The change was twofold. Experience lost the practical meaning which it
had borne from the time of Plato. It ceased to mean ways of doing
and being done to, and became a name for something intellectual and
cognitive. It meant the apprehension of material which should ballast
and check the exercise of reasoning. By the modern philosophic
empiricist and by his opponent, experience has been looked upon just as
a way of knowing. The only question was how good a way it is. The
result was an even greater "intellectualism" than is found in ancient
philosophy, if that word be used to designate an emphatic and almost
exclusive interest in knowledge in its isolation. Practice was not
so much subordinated to knowledge as treated as a kind of tag-end or
aftermath of knowledge. The educational result was only to confirm the
exclusion of active pursuits from the school, save as they might be
brought in for purely utilitarian ends--the acquisition by drill of
certain habits. 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, wou