Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/231


 * Intuition

only one term enjoyable living presentation acquaintance inexpressible that which is ordered content
 * Knowledge

two terms useful thinking explanation description expression order form

The main result of this discussion is, that it clears the air of all prejudices against scientific knowledge and its method. We can no longer believe that philosophy is in possession of a higher kind of knowledge giving us a profound and ultimate insight into the nature of things that science is always approaching without ever being able to attains it, because it has to stop short at certain points which mark the final boundary of all discursive scientific knowledge. There is no such boundary, there is no intuitive knowledge which philosophy can claim as her own special method.

It is only in recent times that scientific and philosophical knowledge have been confronted in this confusing way. It has been most decidedly done by Schopenhauer and Bergson who both declare that science looks at the world from the outside only, whereas philosophy, by means of intuition, looks at it from the inside.

The thought which shines through the words of these two thinkers is the fundamental idea not only of their own philosophy, but of the metaphysics of all times. Metaphysics, in the stricter sense of the word, has always been aiming at the "inmost nature of things in themselves", and what was really meant by this or some similar phrase is nothing but content, although this term may never have been used; and its conception of knowledge, although this was often not stated explicitly, has always been the mystical one of intuition, of intimate acquaintance. All metaphysicians have tried to tell us what the content of the world was like: they sought to express the inexpressible. That is why they failed. A careful survey of the history of philosophy would easily show that all metaphysics really consisted of desperate attempts to express content;