Who could have predicted the decline of empiricism? Or is the decline itself an illusion? At the start of the twentieth century, the fractious disputes of Bergsonian intuitionists and sundry utopian metaphysicians fell into what seemed to many to be a 40- year- long sweet swoon. Empiricism blossomed in triumph. The prosperous flowers of empirical science, freshly arrayed in pleasant gardens by the logical positivists, perfumed the latest intellectual air. The richness of these new flowers cast its fragrance beyond Britain and America, where commonsensical traditions in philosophy had recently been fertilized by Charles Peirce, William James, Thomas Huxley and Bertrand Russell. It was inhaled, agreeably, on the Continent as well. The result was a deception, or a self- deception. Empiricism seemed far better established than in fact it was. The flowers were often regarded as deathless. If in 1917 Russell could define metaphysics as “the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means of thought” and describe it as leading into both science and mysticism, he could also, with the confidence of wide agreement, airily dismiss mystical metaphysicians on the grounds of their “denial of the reality of Time.” He could add, rather archly, “This is an outcome of the denial of division; if all is one, the distinction of past and future must be illusory. We have seen this doctrine prominent in Parnenides; and among the moderns it is fundamental in the systems of Spinoza and Hegel.” Russell's belief in the permanence of the modern empirical garden was premature, and this after tortured centuries of experimental seeding and cultivation. In the late twentieth century, mystical metaphysics, and other linguistically opaque types of Utopian metaphysical thought, have in fact returned— awakened from their swoon— with an icy vengeance. A vicious pruning of all sorts of empirical flowers has been in process for the past 30 years.

To the historian this comes as no surprise. The development of any form of empiricism has never been easy. Modern expressions of it, in science, philosophy and the arts, have in fact always struggled into growth between the contempt of the religious and the scorn of often fanatical philosophical idealists.