certain representation of things exactly as they are. He despaired of the power of either sense-perception or conceptual thought to reach the goal, and he ended in Humian scepticism precisely because his ideal of truth was so extravagant, as extravagant as any rationalist's.
With this outcome of empiricism not all the opponents of rationalism were disposed to come to rest. Unwilling to abandon the possibility of grasping reality as it is, and yet not satisfied with the cheerless conclusions and cold-blooded methods of intellectualism, mystics and faith-philosophers,—the Pascals, Huets, Bossuets, Poirets, Bayles, Rousseaus, and Hamanns,—appealed to other phases and functions of the human soul for help in stilling the longing for certainty: truth rests upon feeling, faith, or mystical vision of some sort; God is not conceived by the reason, but felt by the heart; the intellect busies itself with mere ideas, unreal shadows; the spirit of mathematics favors fatalism. These anti-intellectualistic tendencies were not new in the history of human thinking; they had accompanied philosophy as a chorus of protest almost from the beginning, which every now and then threatened to drown out the voices of the leading singers. But what particularly encouraged the reactionary movements in the modern era was the mechanical conception of natural science and the deterministic world-views to which it had given rise. Descartes and Spinoza both surrendered the natural order to mechanism,—the former somewhat hesitatingly, the latter boldly and completely. Descartes had reserved the spiritual world as an independent kingdom from which mechanism was barred, but Spinoza seemed to introduce even into the realm of mind the same rigid determinism that ruled the world of bodies. For both, the physical order was practically a machine; the Aristotelian metaphysics with its emphasis on life and purpose, which had controlled the thoughts of men for two thousand years, eked out a questionable existence in the theology-ridden universities, while all fruitful thinkers joined the ranks of the revolutionaries. It was this situation with its danger to human values that aroused opposition to the intellect and logic as sources of the highest truth, and made converts for fideism, intuitionism, and mysticism.
