110 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
to be ideal (conceptual). Thus, dualism splits the cognitive
process into two parts. One of them, the creation of the per-
ceptual object out of the thing-in-itself, is assigned a place
outside consciousness, and the other, the connection of the
percept to the concept and the relation of the concept to the
object, is assigned a placewithin consciousness.
Given these presuppositions, it is clear why dualists be-
lieve it possible to attain only subjective representations
of what liesbefore our consciousness. For dualists of this
kind, the objective/real process in the subject, through
which the percept arises, and, all the more so, the objec-
tive relationships of things-in-themselves, are not directly
knowable. In their view, human beings can only construct
conceptual representations of what is objectively real.
The bond of unity that links things, both among them-
selves and to our individual spirit (as a thing-in-itself),
lies beyond consciousness in a being-in-itself of whom,
likewise, we can only have a conceptual representative in
our consciousness.
Dualism believes that the whole world would evaporate
into an abstract conceptual schema if “real” connections
were not affirmed alongside the conceptual connections
of objects. In other words, the conceptual principles dis-
coverable through thinking appear too airy to dualists,
and so they look for additional, real principles by which
to support them.
Let us look more closely at these real principles. The
naive person (that is, a naive realist) regards the objects
of external experience as realities. The evidence for their
reality is that they can be grasped by the hand and seen by
[12]
[13]
