V. THIRD ATTITUDE OF THOUGHT 
TO OBJECTIVITY
IMMEDIATE OR INTUITIVE 
KNOWLEDGE
§ 61
If we are to believe the Critical philosophy, thought is subjective, and its 
ultimate and invincible mode is abstract universality or formal identity. 
Thought is thus set in opposition to Truth, which is no abstraction, but 
concrete universality. In this highest mode of thought, which is entitled 
Reason, the Categories are left out of account. The extreme theory on the 
opposite side holds thought to be an act of the particular only, and on that 
ground declares it incapable of apprehending the Truth. This is the 
Intuitional theory.
§62
According to this theory, thinking, a private and particular operation, has 
its whole scope and product in the Categories. But these Categories, as 
arrested by the understanding, are limited vehicles of thought, forms of the 
conditioned, of the dependent and derivative. A thought limited to these 
modes has no sense of the Infinite and the True, and cannot bridge over the 
gulf that separates it from them. (This stricture refers to the proofs of God's 
existence.) These inadequate modes or categories are also spoken of as 
notions: and to get a notion of an object therefore can only mean, in this 
language, to grasp it under the form of being conditioned and derivative. 
Consequently, if the object in question be the True, the Infinite, the 
Unconditioned, we change it by our notions into a finite and conditioned; v 
hereby, instead of apprehending the truth by thought, we have perverted it 
into untruth.
§66
Beyond this point then we need not go: immediate knowledge is to be 
accepted as a fact. Under these circumstances examination is directed to 
the field of experience, to a psychological phenomenon. If that be so, we 
need only note, as the commonest of experiences, that truths which we well 
know to be results of complicated and highly mediated trains of thought 
present themselves immediately and without effort to the mind of any man 
who is familiar with the subject. The mathematician, like everyone who has 
mastered a particular science, meets any problem with ready-made 
solutions which presuppose most complicated analyses: and every educated 
man has a number of general views and maxims which he can muster 
without trouble, but which can only have sprung from frequent reflection 
and long experience. The facility we attain in any sort of knowledge, art, or 
technical expertness, consists in having the particular knowledge or kind of 
action present to our mind in any case that occurs, even, we may say, 
immediate in our very limbs, in an outgoing activity. In all these instances, 
immediacy of knowledge is so far from excluding mediation, that the two 
things are linked together - immediate knowledge being actually the 
product and result of mediated knowledge.
It is no less obvious that immediate existence is bound up with its 
mediation. The seed and the parents are immediate and initial existences in 
respect of the offspring which they generate. But the seed and the parents, 
though they exist and are therefore immediate, are yet in their turn 
generated; and the child, without prejudice to the mediation of its 
existence, is immediate, because it is. The fact that I am in Berlin, my 
immediate presence here, is mediated by my having made the journey 
hither.
§78
... Scepticism, besides, could only get hold of the finite forms as they were 
suggested by experience, taking them as given, instead of deducing them 
scientifically. To require such a scepticism accomplished is the same as to 
insist on science being preceded by universal doubt, or a total absence of 
presupposition. Strictly speaking, in the resolve that wills pure thought, this 
requirement is accomplished by freedom which, abstracting from 
everything, grasps its pure abstraction, the simplicity of thought.