Doubts about Empiricism

Abstract

My beliefs during the first stage of my philosophical career were a mixed brew of ingredients taken from the Greek and Christian traditions. My tastes were conservative and even reactionary. I believed in the reality of substance, material and mental; I held that there are universal and necessary connections in nature which can be known. In short, I was a naive objectivist about things and about structures. I was a realist about values too. I believed that there are such traits in nature as good and bad, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, independently of my preferences. I was convinced further that goodness was a supreme causal agent; that—to paraphrase the familiar quotation—righteousness is power. I believed in God. With Plato (in the Phaedo) I maintained that causality is not only efficient but final too; that nature exhibits both a mechanical and a moral order. And these two propositions were, to my view, but twin aspects of the one proposition that nature will not deceive my expectations.