timated sense and underestimated the
understanding, when it found the source of all knowledge in the faculty of
perception and degraded the faculty of thought to an almost wholly inactive
recipient of messages coming to it from without. From the standpoint of
empiricism concepts (Ideas) deserve confidence only in so far as they can
legitimate themselves by their origin in sensations (impressions). It
overlooks the _active_ character of all knowing. Among the rationalists,
on the other hand, we find an underestimation of the senses and an
overestimation of the understanding. They believe that sense reveals
only the deceptive exterior of things, while reason gives their true
non-sensuous essence. That which the mind perceives of things is deceptive,
but that which it thinks concerning them is true. The former power is the
faculty of confused, the latter the faculty of distinct knowledge. Sense is
the enemy rather than the servant of true knowledge, which consists in the
development and explication of pregnant innate conceptions and principles.
These philosophers forget that we can never reach reality by conceptual
analysis; and that the senses have a far greater importance for knowledge
than merely to give it an impulse; that it is they which supply the
understanding with real objects, and so with the content of knowledge.
Beside the (formal) activity (of the understanding), cognition implies a
passive factor, a reception of impressions. Neither sense alone nor the
understanding alone produces knowledge, but both cognitive powers are
necessary, the active and the passive, the conceptual and the intuitive.
Here the question arises, How do concept and intuition, sensuous and
rational knowledge, differ, and what is the basis of their congruence?
Notwithstanding their different points of departure and their variant
results, the two main tendencies of modern philosophy agree in certain
points. If the conflict between the two schools and their one-sidedness
suggested the idea of supplementing the conclusions of the one by those of
the other, the recognition of the incorrectness of their common
convictions furnished the occasion to go beyond them and to establish a
new, a higher point of view above them both, as also above the eclecticism
which sought to unite the opposing principles. The errors common to both
concern, in the first place, the nature of judgment and the difference
between sensibility and understanding. Neither side