some extent also in the art of medicine, philosophical empiricism will accept nothing but experience, and will build upon no other basis; but it forgets to determine accurately the concept of experience from which it starts. The “critical empiricism” which, since Hume, has set about its work more cautiously, looks for the universal element in experience; it tries to find how far we can attain through experience to universal and necessary knowledge, or how far we are forced, by a speculative construction upon the basis of experience, to supplement it by logical inferences. “Criticism,” finally, has for its aim, since Kant’s time, to establish critically the possibility of knowledge, no matter whether it leads us to a positive or negative result.
Empiriocriticism, on the other hand, takes up the position that everything is experience when it has been stated as experienced by an individual—though it may be that primarily it is only experience for this one individual in question. (If, e.g., a child states that it has seen angels, then the angels are an experience for the child.) But then we investigate the difference between this concept of experience which is valid for the individual and the concept of experience which is universally valid (interindividuell gültig). Thus empiriocriticism also approaches experience critically, but it does not determine its concept of experience beforehand; it begins by admitting everything as experience, provided only that it is at the moment predicated and characterised as experience by an individual. It does not arbitrarily limit its sphere, but says: If I am to approach experience critically, then I must include in the object of my investigation all predications which contain an experience; I must not prejudge the question of true and false, for the decision as to that can only follow from the theory.
Empiriocriticism is then not empiricism; moreover, it approaches its task purely speculatively (in the good sense of this much-abused word), although it builds entirely upon the results of the natural sciences. This speculative character may be frankly conceded without fear of confusion with the speculative method of metaphysics. The speculation in the empiriocritical theory does not extend to the contents of knowledge and experience, but to their universal form. Only the speculative investigation of the contents of knowledge has proved itself to be unfruitful and unscientific.
The Kritik der reinen Erfahrung is not only a theory of experience, but, inasmuch as experience is a species of
