Are There Limits to Cognition? 113themselves. For the naive realist, only individual tulips
that are seen, or that can be seen, count as real; the idea of
a tulip counts only as an abstraction, as an unreal thought-
image that the soul assembles from characteristics com-
mon to all tulips.
Naive realism, with its fundamental principle of the re-
ality of everything perceived, is contradicted by experi-
ence, which teaches us that the content of perception is
transient. The tulip that I see is real today; a year hence,
it will have vanished into nothingness. What lasts is the
speciesof tulip. But, for naive realism, this species is
“only” an idea, not a reality. Thus, the naive realist
world-view is in the position of seeing its realities come
and go, while what it regards as unreal is more lasting
than the real. In addition to percepts, naive realism has to
acknowledge something conceptual. It has to include en-
tities that cannot be perceived with the senses. It recon-
ciles itself to this by conceiving their mode of existence
as analogous to that of sense objects. The invisible forces
through which sense perceptible things affect one anoth-
er are just such hypothetically assumed realities. So, too,
is heredity, which has effects above and beyond the indi-
vidual, and which is the reason for the development out
of one individual of a new individual that is similar to the
first, so that the species persists. The life principle perme-
ating the organic body is another such assumed reality; so
is the soul (for which naive consciousness always forms
a concept analogous to sense realities); and so, finally, is
the naive human’s Divine Being. This Divine Being is
thought to act in a fashion that exactly corresponds to the