ses
them. In this, therefore, which was the most important point of the
controversy, the rationalists were in the right.

On the other hand, even that part of our knowledge which is _logically_
independent of experience (in the sense that experience cannot prove
it) is yet elicited and caused by experience. It is on occasion of
particular experiences that we become aware of the general laws which
their connexions exemplify. It would certainly be absurd to suppose that
there are innate principles in the sense that babies are born with a
knowledge of everything which men know and which cannot be deduced from
what is experienced. For this reason, the word 'innate' would not now be
employed to describe our knowledge of logical principles. The phrase
'_a priori_' is less objectionable, and is more usual in modern writers.
Thus, while admitting that all knowledge is elicited and caused by
experience, we shall nevertheless hold that some knowledge is _a
priori_, in the sense that the experience which makes us think of it
does not suffice to prove it, but merely so directs our attention that
we see its truth without requiring any proof from experience.

There is another point of great importance, in which the empiricists
were in the right as against the rationalists. Nothing can be known to
_exist_ except by the help of experience. That is to say, if we wish to
prove that something of which we have no direct experience exists, we
must have among our premisses the existence of one or more things of
which we have direct experience. Our belief that the Emperor of China
exists, for example, rests upon testimony, and testimony consists,
in the last analysis, of sense-data seen or heard in reading or being
spoken to. Rationalists believed that, from general consideration as
to what must be, they could deduce the existence of this or that in the
actual world. In this belief they seem to have been mistaken. All the
knowledge that we can acquire _a priori_ concerning existence seems
to be hypothetical: it tells us that if one thing exists, another must
exist, or, more generally, that if one proposition is true, another must
be true. This is exemplified by the principles we have already dealt
with, such as '_if_ this is true, and this implies that, then that is
true', or '_if_ this and that have been repeatedly found connected, they
will probably be connected in the next instance in which one of them is
found'. Thus the scope and power