The aim of the following discussions is to reduce the act of cognition,
by analysis, to its ultimate elements and thus to discover a correct
formulation of the problem of knowledge and a way to its solution. They
criticise all theories of knowledge which are based on Kant's line
of thought, in order to show that along this road no solution of
the problem of knowledge can ever be found. It is, however, due to
the fundamental spade-work which Volkelt has done in his thorough
examination of the concept of experience, [64] to acknowledge that
without his preliminary labours the precise determination, which
I have here attempted of the concept of the Given would have been
very much more difficult. However, we are cherishing the hope that we
have laid the foundations for our emancipation from the Subjectivism
which attaches to all theories of knowledge that start from Kant. We
believe ourselves to have achieved this emancipation through showing
that the subjective form, in which the picture of the world presents
itself to the act of cognition, prior to its elaboration by science,
is nothing but a necessary stage of transition which is overcome in
the very process of knowledge itself. For us, experience, so-called,
which Positivism and Neo-Kantianism would like to represent as the
only thing which is certain, is precisely the most subjective of
all. In demonstrating this, we also show that Objective Idealism is
the inevitable conclusion of a theory of knowledge which understands
itself. It differs from the metaphysical and absolute Idealism of Hegel
in this, that it seeks in the subject of knowledge the ground for the
diremption of reality into given existence and concept, and that it
looks for the reconciliation of this divorce, not in an objective
world-dialectic, but in the subjective process of cognition. The
present writer has already once before advocated this point of view
in print, viz., in the Outlines of a Theory of Knowledge (Berlin and
Stuttgart, 1885). However, that book differs essentially in method
from the present essay, and it also lacks the analytic reduction of
knowledge to its ultimate elements.