lism found conscious formulation in
the nominalistic philosophies, which treated the structure of knowledge
as something built up within the individual through his own acts, and
mental states. With the rise of economic and political individualism
after the sixteenth century, and with the development of Protestantism,
the times were ripe for an emphasis upon the rights and duties of the
individual in achieving knowledge for himself. This led to the view that
knowledge is won wholly through personal and private experiences. As a
consequence, mind, the source and possessor of knowledge, was thought
of as wholly individual. Thus upon the educational side, we find
educational reformers, like Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, henceforth
vehemently denouncing all learning which is acquired on hearsay, and
asserting that even if beliefs happen to be true, they do not constitute
knowledge unless they have grown up in and been tested by personal
experience. The reaction against authority in all spheres of life, and
the intensity of the struggle, against great odds, for freedom of action
and inquiry, led to such an emphasis upon personal observations and
ideas as in effect to isolate mind, and set it apart from the world to
be known.

This isolation is reflected in the great development of that branch
of philosophy known as epistemology--the theory of knowledge. The
identification of mind with the self, and the setting up of the self as
something independent and self-sufficient, created such a gulf between
the knowing mind and the world that it became a question how knowledge
was possible at all. Given a subject--the knower--and an object--the
thing to be known--wholly separate from one another, it is necessary to
frame a theory to explain how they get into connection with each other
so that valid knowledge may result. This problem, with the allied one
of the possibility of the world acting upon the mind and the mind acting
upon the world, became almost the exclusive preoccupation of philosophic
thought.

The theories that we cannot know the world as it really is but only the
impressions made upon the mind, or that there is no world beyond the
individual mind, or that knowledge is only a certain association of
the mind's own states, were products of this preoccupation. We are not
directly concerned with their truth; but the fact that such desperate
solutions were widely accepted is evidence of the extent to which mind
had been set over t