Are There Limits to Cognition? 117forces with the conceptual connections achieved through
thinking. But these connections are thelaws of nature. A
natural law, after all, is nothing other than a conceptual
expression for the connection between certain percepts.
Monism never has to seek for explanatory principles of
reality outside percepts and concepts. Monism realizes
that, in the whole realm of reality, there is neveroccasion
to do so. It sees the perceptual world, as it appears imme-
diately to our perceiving, as something half-real. It finds
full reality in the union of that world with the conceptual
world. The metaphysical realist may object to the monist:
“As far as your organism is concerned, it may be that your
cognition is perfect in itself, that it lacks nothing; but you
do not know how the world would be reflected in an intel-
ligence organized differently from your own.” To this
monism will respond: “If there are non-human intelli-
gences whose percepts have a form different from our
own, what has meaning for me is still only what reaches
me through my perceiving and concepts.”
Through my perceiving—in fact, through specifically
human perceiving—I am located as a subject over against
an object. The connection between things is thus interrupt-
ed. The subject then restores that connection through
thinking. Thereby it reintegrates itself into the world as a
whole. Since it is only through our own subject that the
whole appears to be torn apart at the place between our
percept and our concept, it is also in the union of those two
that true cognition is given. For beings with a different
perceptual world (for example, beings with double the
number of sense organs), the connection would appear