ard any empiricism as necessarily committed to a belief in a
cut-and-dried reliance upon disconnected precedents, and who hold that
all systematic organization of past experiences for new and constructive
purposes is alien to strict empiricism.

Rationalism never explained, however, how a reason extraneous to
experience could enter into helpful relation with concrete experiences.
By definition, reason and experience were antithetical, so that the
concern of reason was not the fruitful expansion and guidance of the
course of experience, but a realm of considerations too sublime to
touch, or be touched by, experience. Discreet rationalists confined
themselves to theology and allied branches of abtruse science, and to
mathematics. Rationalism would have been a doctrine reserved for
academic specialists and abstract formalists had it not assumed the task
of providing an apologetics for traditional morals and theology, thereby
getting into touch with actual human beliefs and concerns. It is
notorious that historic empiricism was strong in criticism and in
demolition of outworn beliefs, but weak for purposes of constructive
social direction. But we frequently overlook the fact that whenever
rationalism cut free from conservative apologetics, it was also simply
an instrumentality for pointing out inconsistencies and absurdities in
existing beliefs--a sphere in which it was immensely useful, as the
Enlightenment shows. Leibniz and Voltaire were contemporary rationalists
in more senses than one.[3]

The recognition that reflection is a genuine factor within experience
and an indispensable factor in that control of the world which secures a
prosperous and significant expansion of experience undermines historic
rationalism as assuredly as it abolishes the foundations of historic
empiricism. The bearing of a correct idea of the place and office of
reflection upon modern idealisms is less obvious, but no less certain.

One of the curiosities of orthodox empiricism is that its outstanding
speculative problem is the existence of an "external world." For in
accordance with the notion that experience is attached to a private
subject as its exclusive possession, a world like the one in which we
appear to live must be "external" to experience instead of being its
subject-matter. I call it a curiosity, for if anything seems adequately
grounded empirically it is the existence of a world which resists the
characteristic functions of the su