Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

Knowing the World 73

CHAPTER 5

KNOWING THE WORLD

It follows from our considerations so far that we cannot
prove our percepts are mental pictures by investigating
the content of our observations. Such proof is supposedly
established by showing that—if the perceptual process
occurs as it is believed to do on the basis of naive-realistic
assumptions about the psychological and physiological
constitution of the individual—we have to do not with
things in themselves but only with mental pictures of
things. However, if naive realism, consistently pursued,
leads to results that represent the exact opposite of its as-
sumptions, then those assumptions must be seen as un-
suitable for founding a worldview and dropped. In any
case, it is invalid to reject the assumptions and accept the
consequences, as the critical idealists do who base their
claim that the world is my mental picture on the above
line of argument. (Eduard von Hartmann gives a detailed
presentation of this line of argument inThe Fundamental
Problems of Epistemology.)

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