Therefore, God must have created the universe. There are many types of rationalism, and we usually refer to them by their creators. The most magnificent example of rationalism is Benedict Spinoza s. But from that truth, he carefully, step by step, reasons his way to a very sophisticated system of metaphysics, ethics, and psychology. Now let s turn to empiricism.
Many people think that empiricism is the same thing as science.
That is an unfortunate mistake. It means that there is an observation that I made that you can make, too, and that, were it possible, everyone should be able to make. In order to build a more complex body of knowledge from these direct observations, we must make use of induction , also known as indirect empirical knowledge . We take the observations and carefully stretch them to cover more ground than we could actually cover directly. The basic form of this is called generalization .