Twenty years ago, the classical tradition, having vanquished the opposing tradition of the English empiricists, held almost unquestioned sway in all Anglo-Saxon universities.
It became a matter of great importance to the British empiricists to scrutinize all human conceptions to see whether there was any basis for them in actual experience.
There is another point of great importance, in which the empiricists were in the right as against the rationalists. Nothing can be known to exist except by the help of experience.