ied to the Understanding, which
plays the part merely of a receptive surface or _tabula rasa_.

In the hands of Aristotle this doctrine took the form of an affirmation
that Nature must be regarded as an energetic process containing within
itself the potency by which it perpetually generated the actual.

Promising as it was in Aristotle's hands, this speculation was not
carried forward or assimilated by his immediate successors. Indeed, it
was practically forgotten until the intellectual revival of the
sixteenth century, which inaugurated the foundations of modern Science.
However little the fact may have been consciously recognised even by
the leaders of scientific discovery, this was the conception of Nature
which inspired and sustained the scientific advance. In the department
of philosophic speculation, however, it appeared only under the debased
and misleading form of a belief that the sensible presentation was the
true source of the contents of Cognition, that it was from Sensation
that the Mind of Man derived the whole fabric of Science. "_Penser c'est
sentir_" was the form in which it was expressed by Condillac, but was
equally the view which commended itself to Berkeley, at least in his
early writings, to Hume, and to a whole army of successors down to J. S.
Mill.

We hope we have already sufficiently emphasised the falsity of such a
view. Obviously, if the Mind were merely the passive recipient of a
stream of impressions, no sort of rational Discourse, no scientific or
cognitive effort could ever have been stimulated into activity, and the
very ideas of causality and relation, indeed all that we associate with
the exercise of the understanding, could never have been called into
being.

Upon neither of these views of the nature of Knowledge can we arrive at
any consistent or intelligible conception of its genesis, nature, or
method of operation.

What, then, must we do? It is hardly doubtful that if we are to make
any progress we must find another and a new key whereby to unlock the
double door that bars the entrance to the inner shrine of truth.

Now _the_ fundamental, or at least _a_ fundamental error characteristic
of all these various efforts after a solution is to be found in the fact
that they view the World as a static thing rather than as a kinetic
process.

The World to vision seems a great still thing in or on which no doubt
innumerable bodies are moving to and fro, but which itself--the
funda