The World as Percept 61self while I perceive the table. This view must not be con-
fused with the Berkeleyan view mentioned above. Berke-
ley asserts the subjective nature of my perceptual content,
but he does not say that I can know only my mental pic-
tures. He limits my knowledge to my mental pictures be-
cause he believes that there are no objects outside mental
picturing. In this view, once I cease directing my gaze to-
ward it, what I regard as a table no longer exists. Hence for
Berkeley my percepts arise immediately from the power
of God. I see a table because God calls forth this percept
in me. Berkeley knows of no real beings other than God
and human spirits. What we call the world is present only
within spirits. What the naive human being calls the outer
world, corporeal nature, does not exist for Berkeley.
Berkeley’s view stands in contrast to the currently pre-
vailing Kantian view.^4 This also limits our knowledge of
the world to our mental pictures. But it does not do so be-
cause of the conviction that no things except these mental
pictures can exist. Rather, the Kantian view believes us to
be so organized that we can learn only of modifications in
our own self, not of the things-in-themselves that cause
them. From the circumstance that I know only my mental
- Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Generally considered to be the
founder of epistemology, and indeed, philosophy in the modern
sense. Steiner began his “prelude” to Intuitive Thinking—Truth and
Science Knowledge—with the sentence: “Present day phi-
losophy suffers from an unhealthy faith in Kant.” To the extent that it
is believed that human beings can only know the forms of their own
knowing and that there are therefore limits to the human ability to
know, this unhealthy dependence of Kant still prevails today.