Lecture I

We must, however, look very exactly at how we treat the perceptual facts of the world when we do not use our mathematical knowledge. We might ask what happens when we simply observe the outer world and make mental pictures about the connections between the observable facts—for instance, when we use the familiar law of cause and effect. We must acquire some thoughts about what we are doing when we simply observe the facts of the outer world. What do we really do when we bring order into the sense-perceptible chaos? It appears to me that in relation to this question David Hume has spoken quite correctly; however, his fault lies in that he has taken to apply to the universal field of human cognition what is meant only for this particular field, namely, the “observation of outer nature free of mathematics.”