Knowing the World 89things. Just as a colorblind person sees only shades of
brilliance without hue, so a person without intuition ob-
serves only unconnected perceptual fragments.
Toexplain a thing, tomake it comprehensible, means
nothing other than to place it into the context from which
it has been torn by the arrangement of our organization,
described above. There is no such thing as an object cut
off from the world-as-a-whole. All separation has merely
a subjective validity for us, for the way we are organized.
For us, the world-whole splits into above and below, be-
fore and after, cause and effect, object and mental picture,
matter and force, object and subject, and so forth. What
meets us in observation as separate details is linked, item
by item, through the coherent, unitary world of our intui-
tions. Through thinking we join together into one every-
thing that we separated through perceiving.
The enigmatic quality of an object lies in its separate
existence. But this separate existence is called forth by us
and can, within the conceptual world, be dispelled and re-
turned to unity again.
Nothing is given to us directly except through thinking
and perceiving. The question now arises: “What is the
significance of the percept according to the reasoning
here?” We have, to be sure, recognized that critical ideal-
ism’s proof of the subjective nature of percepts collapses
in itself. But insight into the incorrectness of the proof
does not yet confirm that the doctrine itself is based on er-
ror. Critical idealism’s proof does not proceed from the
absolute nature of thinking; rather, it is based on the fact
that naive realism, if followed consistently, cancels itself