The Star in the West

THE NEW WINE 195 hoc signo vinces Non timendum est Veritate duce . " In order to cut a long story short , it may be as sumed that so-called modern philosophy finds its founder in the French philosopher Descartes ; for it was he who started to unravel the Penelope web of tangled philosophic thought , which had lain sleeping for a thousand years or more upon the sterile shelf of Christian impotence . His theories of “ Innate ideas ” raised the anger of Locke , the disciple of Aristotle and Bacon . Revolting from the cogito ergo sum of Descartes , he compared the mind to a tabula rasa , on which he in his turn wrote an equal absurdity in the words : nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu . Leibnitz in his day , perceiving the weakness in this axiom , ex tended its phraseology , but in no way its meaning , by adding Excipi nisi ipse intellectus . This weakness in Locke's system became only too apparent to his followers ; and Berkeley , as well as Hume , and later still Kant himself , travelling by slightly different roads , ultimately arrived at the same destination : we cannot go beyond experience .” In the first half of the last century Kant's immedi ate successors , such as Fichte , Schelling and Hegel , swinging round this central point of attraction , though viewing it from different positions , ultimately , like moths round a candle , fell spluttering into the socket , burnt by that same flame they were attempting to explain away . Nevertheless , though at first their Narcissus - like self - worship may seem to have been productive of little good , at least , however , it has brought to blossom one irrefragable and irrefutable fact , and that is : that in some apparently unknown