Philosophy, for Mill, was a Manichean struggle between two opposed schools of thought, that of a priorists who believe it to be possible "by direct intuition, to perceive things, and recognise truths, not cognizable by our senses," and that of the empiricist followers of Locke, who maintain that, "Of nature, or anything whatever external to ourselves, we know ... nothing, except the facts which present themselves to our senses, and such other facts as may, by analogy, be inferred from these" (CO, p. 125). Between these conflicting parties, Mill reported, "there reigns a bellum internecinum," one side accusing its opponents of being "beasts," while the other condemns its rivals as "lunatics' (CO, p. 126). His own allegiance to the 'school of experience" was unwavering, and he believed that whatever shortcomings were to be found in the writings of Locke, Hartley, Bentham and other of its influential protagonists could be removed without any fundamental deviation from the spirit of their doctrines. In 1840, when Mill published his essay on Coleridge, the position of the experience school, or empiricists as we would call them, was, in his view, an embattled one, "Coleridge, German philosophers since Kant and most English philosophers since Reid" dissenting from the theory that sensation offers "not only the exclusive sources, but the sole materials of our knowledge" (CO, p. 125). Three decades later he felt able to record, with some justified self-satisfaction, that his own efforts, coupled with those of his father and Alexander Bain, had greatly improved the public reputation of empiricism (AU, p. 270).