Second Lecture

At that time, however, the fruits of agnosticism regarding the process of cognition presented the soul with nothing other than what had emerged in the development of Kantianism and what had further manifested itself in the development of what had been the maxim of physiological imagination in the 19th century since Johannes Müller. People thought that the only way to explore what was truly real was to look outside, and that thinking only had the task of depicting this exterior; one would arrive at correct thinking not by bringing something from within the human being into perception, but by using thinking only passively to create images of reality. But this reality, it was thought, already existed somewhere, quite apart from the thought process, from the inner soul process. Such thinking then leads to imaginary concepts, such as the familiar or unfamiliar “thing in itself.” Talking about this “thing in itself” only makes sense if one believes that reality must exist somewhere, apart from human knowledge, and that one only needs to use certain procedures to gain knowledge of this reality. Then the process of cognition would not be something actually experienced, but only something formal, standing in the corner alongside real events and real things. In contrast, it became clear to me that cognition is in fact something real; because by examining the actual content of perception, that is, what we are devoted to when we passively allow the outside world to affect us through our senses, it became apparent that this outside world does not contain reality, but that humans are born into the world in such a way that when they look into this outside world only through their senses, he experiences only half of this reality, only one side of reality, through his senses.