104 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
CHAPTER 7
ARE THERE LIMITS TO COGNITION?
We have established that the elements needed to explain
reality are to be drawn from the two spheres of perceiving
and thinking. As we have seen, we are so organized that
the full, total reality (including that of ourselves as sub-
jects) initially appears to us as a duality. Cognition over-
comes this duality by composing the thing as a whole out
of the two elements of reality: the percept, and the concept
worked out by thinking. Let us call the way in which the
world meets us, before it has gained its true form through
cognition, “the world of appearance,” in contrast to the
unified reality composed of percepts and concepts. We
can then say that the world is given to us as a duality, and
cognition assimilates it into a (monistic) unity. A philoso-
phy that proceeds from this fundamental principal can be
characterized as monistic philosophy ormonism. In con-
trast to it stands two-world theory ordualism. The latter
does not, for example, assume that there are two sides to a
unitary reality that are separated merely by our organi-
zation, but that there are two worlds that are absolutely
[1]
