onnection of given intuitions in one experience. (º34 Pages 63-64)
Quote 7: When I speak of objects in time and in space, it is not of things in themselves, of which I know nothing, but of things in appearance, that is, of experience, as the particular way of knowing objects which is afforded to man. (º52c Page 89)
Quote 8: In mathematics and in natural philosophy, human reason admits of limits but not of bounds; namely, it admits that something indeed lies without it, at which it can never arrive, but not that it will at any point find completion in its internal progress. (º57 Page 101)
Quote 9: Metaphysics, as a natural disposition of reason, is actual; but if considered by itself alone [à], dialectical and illusory. If we think of taking principles from it, and in using them follow the natural, but on that account not less false, illusion, we can never produce science, but only vain dialectical art, in which one school may outdo another but none can ever acquire a just and lasting approbation. (Page 114)
The history of metaphysics and the question of what we know and how we know it goes back to the time of Plato. For Plato, true knowledge was innate knowledge, a knowledge which consisted of the recollection of eternal truths and thus the only knowledge worth having and examining. What we witness here on earth through our senses is a corruption of those eternal truths, caused by our own corrupted souls. For Plato, as laid out in his Republic, the external world is merely one of appearance, at the lower end of his "Divided Line" and just above conjecture and imagining. At the highest level is reason or dialectic through which one can gain knowledge of the "Higher Forms". Thus, his famous Allegory of the Cave at the beginning of Book VII of the Republic (Jowett, 1952).
By the time we get to Descartes, this so-called innate knowledge (or what we know without the need of sense experience) has been severely tightened, ...