12. Philosophy and Theosophy

For today, we are much more interested in something else, namely the web in which philosophical thought of the nineteenth century has become entangled. Let us examine how this came about. Above all, Kant felt the need to show to what extent there was something absolute in thinking, something in which there could be no uncertainty. But everything that comes from experience, he said, is not certain. Certainty can only be given to our judgment by the fact that part of our knowledge does not come from things, but from ourselves. Now, in Kant's sense, we look at things in our cognition as if through a colored glass; in our cognition we catch things in the lawful connections that derive from our own being. Our cognition has certain forms - the spatial form, the temporal form, the category of cause and effect - which have no meaning for the thing in itself, at least man can know nothing of whether the thing in itself exists in space, time or causality. These are forms that arise only from the subject of man, and which man spins about the “thing-in-itself” at the moment in which the latter approaches him, so that the thing-in-itself remains unknown to him. Thus, where man confronts this thing-in-itself, he weaves the form of space and time around it, grasps it in cause and effect; and so man lays his whole web of concepts and forms over the thing-in-itself. That is why there is a certain certainty of knowledge for man, because - as long as he is what he is - time, space and causality apply to him: What man himself sees into things, he must unravel out of them again. But man cannot know what the thing itself is, because he remains eternally caught up in the mental image. Schopenhauer expressed this classically in the sentence: “The world is my mental image”.