We can thus not start from the childhood of man, or from the beginning of humanity, or from any other object of knowledge, but we must begin with the state which logically precedes all knowledge; that is, with our immediate experience of real life. Here, in the naïve experience in which we do not know ourselves as objects which we perceive, but where we feel ourselves in our subjective attitudes as agents of will, as personalities, here we find the original reality not yet shaped and remoulded by scientific conceptions and by the demands of knowledge. And from this basis of primary, naïve reality we must ask ourselves what we mean by seeking knowledge, and how this demand of ours is different from the other activities in which we work out the meaning and the ideals of our life.
One thing is certain, we cannot go back to the old dogmatic standpoint, whether rationalistic or sensualistic. In both cases dogmatism took for granted that there is a real world of things which exist in themselves independent of our subjective attitudes, and that our knowledge has to give us a mirror picture of that self-dependent world. Sensualism averred that we get this knowledge through our perceptions; rationalism, that we get it by reasoning. The one asserted that experience gives us the data which mere abstract reasoning can never supply; the other asserted that our knowledge speaks of necessity which no mere perception can find out. Our modern time has gone through the school of philosophical criticism, and the dogmatic ideas have lost for us their meaning. We know that the world which we think as independent cannot be independent of the forms of our thinking, and that no science has reference to any other world than the world which is determined by the categories of our apperception. There cannot be anything more real than the immediate pure experience, and if we seek the truth of knowledge, we do not set out to discover something which is hidden behind our experience, but we set out simply to make something out of our experience which satisfies certain demands. Our immediate experience does not contain an objective thing and a subjective picture of it, but they are completely one and the same piece of experience. We have the object of our immediate knowledge not in the double form of an outer object independent of ourselves and an idea in us, but we have it as our object there in the practical world before science for its special purposes has broken up that bit of reality into the physical material thing and the psychical content of consciousness. And if this doubleness does not hold for the immediate reality of pure experience, it cannot enter through that reshaping and reconstructing and connecting and interpreting of pure experience which we call our knowledge. All that science gives to us is just such an endlessly enlarged experience, of which every particle remains objective and independent, inasmuch as it is not in us as psychical individuals, while yet completely dependent upon the forms of our subjective experience. The ideal of truth is thus not to gain by reason or by observation ideas in ourselves which correspond as well as possible to absolute things, but to reconstruct the given experience in the service of certain purposes. Everything which completely fulfills the purposes of this intentional reconstruction is true.