Knowing the World 81It is just as untenable to declare the sum of perceptual
characteristics to be the object in question. Certainly it
would be possible for a spirit to be able to receive a con-
cept at the same time as, and unseparated from, a percept.
Such a spirit would then never think of regarding the con-
cept as something not belonging to the object, but would
ascribe it an existence inseparable from the object.
Let me make my point clearer with an example. When I
throw a stone through the air horizontally, I see it in differ-
ent places in succession. I connect these places into a line.
In mathematics, I come to know various kinds of line,
among them the parabola. I know the parabola to be a line
that results when a point moves in a certain lawful way. If
I investigate the conditions according to which the thrown
stone moves, I find that the line of its movement is identi-
cal with what I know as a parabola. That the stone moves
precisely in a parabola is a consequence of the given con-
ditions, and follows necessarily from them. The parabolic
form belongs to the whole phenomenon, like all its other
aspects. The spirit described above, which has no need of
the detour of thinking, would take as given not only the
sum of visual sensations in various places but also, united
with the phenomenon, the parabolic form of the trajectory
that we only add to the phenomenon by means of thinking.
It is not due to the objects that they are initially given to
us without the corresponding concepts but to our spiritual
organization. Our whole being functions in such a way
that for everything in reality, the elements flow to us from
two sides—from the side ofperceiving and from the side
ofthinking.