Are There Limits to Cognition? 107is no way to understand, from their interaction,
how consciousness could arise.^2
Du Bois-Reymond’s argument is characteristic of this
whole orientation of thought. Position and motion are
separated out from the rich world of percepts. They are
then transferred to the notional world of atoms. And as-
tonishment follows that it is impossible to develop con-
crete life out of this homemade principle, imitated from
the perceptual world.
From the definition of the principle of dualism given
above, it follows that dualists, working with a completely
contentless concept of the “in-itself,” cannot arrive at an
explanation of the world.
In every instance, the dualist is constrained to set insur-
mountable barriers to our capacity for cognition. The fol-
lower of a monistic worldview knows that everything
necessary to explain a given world phenomenon must lie
within this world. What prevents us from achieving such
an explanation can be only accidental temporal or spatial
limits, or deficiencies in our organization—deficiencies
not in human organization in general, but only in our own
particular organization.
It follows from the concept of cognizing, as we have
defined it, that we cannot speak of limits to cognition.
Cognizing is not the business of the world in general, but
- FromÜber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens [On the Limits to
Knowledge of Nature], a lecture given to the second open session of
the forty-fifth meeting of German natural science researchers and
doctors, Leipzig, August 14, 1872. Published in that same year.