The World as Percept 63This is how Volkelt’s book, Immanuel Kant’s Episte-
mology, begins.^6 But what is presented in it as if it were
an immediate and self-evident truth is really the result of
the following kind of thought process. “The naive human
being believes that objects, just as we perceive them, also
exist outside human consciousness. But physics, physiol-
ogy and psychology seem to teach that our organization
is necessary for our perceptions and that consequently
we cannot know anything about things other than what
our organization transmits to us. Hence our percepts are
modifications of our organization and not things in them-
selves.” Eduard von Hartmann characterizes this train of
thought as necessarily leading to the conviction that we
can have direct knowledge only of our mental pictures.^7
Because we find, outside our organism, vibrations of
bodies and of the air that appear to us as sound, this view
reasons that what we call sound is nothing more than a
subjective reaction of our organization to these vibra-
tions in the outer world. In the same way, color and
warmth are only modifications of our organism. Accord-
ing to this view, the percepts of warmth and color are
evoked in us by the effects of processes in the outer
world that are utterly different from our experience of
warmth or color. When these processes stimulate the
nerves in my skin, I have the subjective percept of
- Johannes Volkelt (1842–1930) was another Neo-Kantian. Steiner
kept up with the work of Liebmann and Volkelt. See his commentar-
ies in The Riddles of Philosophy, Part Two, Chapter IV. - Cf.Fundamental Problems of Epistemology, pp.16-40.