that we cannot know of before we have perceived them through the senses.
We can call this the material of knowledge. The other is the internal conditions
in man himself—such as the perception of events as happening in time and
space and as processes conforming to an unbreakable law of causality. We
can call this the form of knowledge.”
Alberto and Sophie remained seated for a while gazing out of the
window. Suddenly Sophie saw a little girl between the trees on the opposite
side of the lake.
“Look!” said Sophie. “Who’s that?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
The girl was only visible for a few seconds, then she was gone. Sophie
noticed that she was wearing some kind of red hat.
“We shall under no circumstances let ourselves be distracted.”
“Go on, then.”
“Kant believed that there are clear limits to what we can know. You could
perhaps say that the mind’s ‘glasses’ set these limits.”
“In what way?”
“You remember that philosophers before Kant had discussed the really
‘big’ questions—for instance, whether man has an immortal soul, whether
there is a God, whether nature consists of tiny indivisible particles, and
whether the universe is finite or infinite.”
“Yes.”
“Kant believed there was no certain knowledge to be obtained on these
questions. Not that he rejected this type of argument. On the contrary. If he
had just brushed these questions aside, he could hardly have been called a
philosopher.”
“What did he do?”
“Be patient. In such great philosophical questions, Kant believed that
reason operates beyond the limits of what we humans can comprehend. At
the same time, there is in our nature a basic desire to pose these same
questions. But when, for example, we ask whether the universe is finite or
infinite, we are asking about a totality of which we ourselves are a tiny part.
We can therefore never completely know this totality.”
“Why not?”
“When you put the red glasses on, we demonstrated that according to
Kant there are two elements that contribute to our knowledge of the world.”
“Sensory perception and reason.”
“Yes, the material of our knowledge comes to us through the senses, but
this material must conform to the attributes of reason. For example, one of the
attributes of reason is to seek the cause of an event.”
“Like the ball rolling across the floor.”
“If you like. But when we wonder where the world came from—and then
discuss possible answers—reason is in a sense ‘on hold.’ For it has no
sensory material to process, no experience to make use of, because we have
never experienced the whole of the great reality that we are a tiny part of.”
“We are—in a way—a tiny part of the ball that comes rolling across the
floor. So we can’t know where it came from.”
“But it will always be an attribute of human reason to ask where the ball
comes from. That’s why we ask and ask, we exert ourselves to the fullest to
find answers to all the deepest questions. But we never get anything firm to