ducing it. These two agreements (among
thinkers, and of thought with the being which is thought) are the criteria
of knowledge--let us turn now to its factors. These are essentially the
two brought forward by Kant, sensibility and understanding; Schleiermacher
calls them the organic function and the intellectual function. The organic
activity of the senses furnishes us, in sensations, the unordered, manifold
material of knowledge, which is formed and unified by the activity of
reason. If we except two concepts which limit our knowledge, chaos and
God--absolute formlessness or chaos is an idea just as incapable of
realization as absolute unity or deity--every actual cognition is a product
of both factors, of the sensuous organization and of reason. But these two
do not play equal parts in every cognitive act. When the organic function
is predominant we have perception; when the intellectual function
predominates we have thought in the strict sense. A perfect balance of the
two would be intuition, which, however, constitutes the goal of knowledge,
never fully to be realized. These two kinds of knowledge, therefore, are
not specifically, but only relatively, different: in all perception reason
is also active, and in all thought sensibility, only to a less degree than
the opposite function. Moreover, perception and thought, or sensibility and
reason, are by no means to relate to different objects. They have the same
object, only that the organic activity represents it as an indefinite,
chaotic manifold, while the activity of reason (whose work consists
in discrimination and combination), represents it as a well-ordered
multiplicity and unity. It is the same being which is represented by
perception in the form of an "image," and by thought in the form of a
"concept." In the former case we have the world as chaos; in the latter, we
have it as cosmos. Inasmuch as the two factors in knowledge represent the
same object in relatively different ways, it may be said of them that they
are opposed to each other, and yet identical. The same is true of the two
modes of being which Schleiermacher posits as real and ideal over against
the two factors in thought. The real is that which corresponds to the
organic function, the ideal that which corresponds to the activity of
reason. These forms of being also are opposed, and yet identical. Our
self-consciousness gives clear proof of the fact that _thought and being_
can be _identical_; in it,