[9] It is in virtue of this aspect that the Empire is holy. The term sacrum imperium seems to have been first used about the time of Frederick I., when the emperors were anxious to magnify the sanctity of their office in answer to papal opposition. The emperor himself (see under [Emperor]) was always regarded, and at his coronation treated, as a persona ecclesiastica.
[10] The emperor claimed suzerainty over the greater part of Europe at various dates. Hungary and Poland, France and Spain, the Scandinavian peninsula, the British Isles, were all claimed for the Empire at different times (see Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, c. xii.). The “effective” empire, if indeed it may be called effective, embraced only Germany, Burgundy and the regnum Italiae (the old Lombard kingdom in the valley of the Po).
[11] Cf. the Act 25 Henry VIII. c. 22, § 1: “the lawful kings and emperors of this realm.”
[12] The Papacy, consistent to the last, formally protested at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 against the failure of the Powers to restore the Holy Roman Empire, the “centre of political unity” (Ed.).
[13] The Turks, occupying Constantinople, have also claimed to be the heirs of the old emperors of Constantinople; and their sultans have styled themselves Keisar-i-Rûm.
[14] This does not, of course, apply to Hungary, which since 1867 has not formed part of the Austrian empire and is ruled by the head of the house of Habsburg not as emperor, but as king of Hungary.
EMPIRICISM (from Gr. ἔμπειρος, skilled in, from πεἶρα, experiment), in philosophy, the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-given data. It is opposed to all forms of intuitionalism, and holds that the mind is originally an absolute blank (tabula rasa), on which, as it were, sense-given impressions are mechanically recorded, without any action on the part of the mind. The process by which the mind is thus stored consists of an infinity of individual impressions. The frequent or invariable recurrence of similar series of events gives birth in the mind to what are wrongly called “laws”; in fact, these “laws” are merely statements of experience gathered together by association, and have no other kind of validity. In other words from the empirical standpoint the statement of such a “law” does not contain the word “must”; it merely asserts that such and such series have been invariably observed. In this theory there can strictly be no “causation”; one thing is observed to succeed another, but observations cannot assert that it is “caused” by that thing; it is post hoc, but not propter hoc. The idea of necessary connexion is a purely mental idea, an a priori conception, in which observation of empirical data takes no part; empiricism in ethics likewise does away with the idea of the absolute authority of the moral law as conceived by the intuitionalists. The moral law is merely a collection of rules of conduct based on an infinite number of special cases in which the convenience of society or its rulers has subordinated the inclination of individuals. The fundamental objection to empiricism is that it fails to give an accurate explanation of experience; individual impressions as such are momentary, and their connexion into a body of coherent knowledge presupposes mental action distinct from mere receptivity. Empiricism was characteristic of all early speculation in Greece. During the middle ages the empiric spirit was in abeyance, but it revived from the time of Francis Bacon and was systematized especially in the English philosophers, Locke, Hume, the two Mills, Bentham and the associationist school generally.
See [Association of Ideas]; [Metaphysics]; [Psychology]; [Logic]; besides the biographies of the empirical philosophers.
In medicine, the term is applied to a school of physicians who, in the time of Celsus and Galen, advocated accurate observation of the phenomena of health and disease in the belief that only by the collection of a vast mass of instances would a true science of medicine be attained. This point of view was carried to extremes by those who discarded all real study, and based their treatment on rules of thumb. Hence the modern sense of empirical as applied to the guess work of an untrained quack or charlatan.