Note 1 — VII CONCLUDING REMARKS: EPISTEMOLOGICAL

The world-view which has the closest affinity to ours, as we have here built it up on epistemological foundations, is that of A. E. Biedermann.1 But Biedermann requires for the justification of his point of view dogmatic theses which are quite out of place in Theory of Knowledge. Thus, e.g., he works with the concepts of Being, Substance, Space, Time, etc., without having first analysed the cognitive process by itself. Instead of establishing the fact that the cognitive process consists, to begin with, only of the two elements, the Given and Thought, he talks of the Kinds of Being of the real. For example, in Section 15, he says: “Every content of consciousness includes within itself two fundamental facts—it presents to us, as given, two kinds of Being which we contrast with each other as sensuous and spiritual, thing-like and idea-like, Being.” And in Section 19: “Whatever has a spatio-temporal existence, exists materially; that which is the ground of all existence and the subject of life has an idea-like existence, is real as having an ideal Being.” This sort of argument belongs, not to the Theory of Knowledge, but to Metaphysics, which latter presupposes Theory of Knowledge as its foundation. We must admit that Biedermann’s doctrine has many points of similarity with ours; but our method has not a single point of contact with his. Hence, we have had no occasion to compare our position directly with his. Biedermann’s aim is to gain an epistemological standpoint with the help of a few metaphysical axioms. Our aim is to reach, through an analysis of the process of cognition, a theory of reality.