Tertium Organum

emotional way: 
the growth of emotions, their purification and liberation from 
the self-elements must lead to new knowledge. 
But how can the intellectual way come to new forms of knowledge? 
First of all, what is the new knowledge? 
New knowledge is 
direct perception 
by inner feeling. I feel my own pain 
directly; new knowledge may enable me to 
feel
as my own the pain of 
another man. Thus new knowledge is in itself an expansion of direct 
experience. The question is, can the expansion of objective knowledge be
based on this new experience? We must examine the nature of objective 
knowledge.
Our objective knowledge consists of science and philosophy. 
Inner 
experience
science has always regarded as 
data,
as something which cannot 
be changed, but which is 'doubtful' and needs to be verified and corroborated 
by the objective method. Science studies the world as an objective 
phenomenon, and strives to study man's inner life with all its properties also 
as an objective phenomenon. 

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From another angle, simultaneously with this, there has continued the study of man's 
inner life, as it were, from within, but to this study no great significance was ever 
attached. The limits of inner knowledge, i.e. the frontiers of inner life, were regarded as 
strictly defined, established and unchangeable. The possibility of expansion, though 
based on the same inner experience, was admitted only in the case of objective 
knowledge. 
We must see what constitutes the possibility of the expansion of objective 
knowledge. Is there no mistake here? Is the expansion of objective knowledge founded 
on a limited experience really possible, and are the possibilities of experience really 
limited? 
In developing, science, i.e. objective knowledge, met with obstacles at every turn. 
Science studies 
phenomena; 
as soon as it tries to pass on to the study of 
causes,
it is 
confronted by the wall of the unknown and, 
for it,
the unknowable. The question is: is 
this unknowable absolutely unknowable or is it unknowable only for the methods of 
our science? 
At present this is the situation: the number of unknown facts in every domain of 
scientific knowledge is increasing rapidly; and the unknown threatens to swallow up 
the known or what is accepted as known. The progress of science, especially in recent 
times, may be denned as a very rapid growth of the 
regions of ignorance.
Of course in 
the past there was no less ignorance than there is now. But in the past it was not so 
forcibly felt - then science did not know 
what it is ignorant of.
Now it knows this more 
and more, it realizes more and more clearly its own 
conditional nature.
A little further, 
and in every separate branch of science that 
which it does not know
will outgrow 
that 
which it does know. 
In every department science itself begins to repudiate its first principles. A little 
further, and science as a whole will ask itself: 
Where am I? 
Positivist thinking, which set itself the task of drawing general conclusions from the 
knowledge gained by each separate department of science and by all of them together, 
will find itself obliged to draw a conclusion from that which the sciences do not know. 
And then the whole world will be confronted with a colossus with feet of clay, or rather 
without any feet at all, with a huge nebulous body suspended in mid-air. 
Philosophy has seen for a long time that this colossus has no feet, but the greater pan 
of cultured humanity is still under the hypnosis of positivism, which sees something in 
the place of those feet. Soon, 

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however, this illusion will have to be abandoned. Mathematics, which lies at the 
foundation of positive knowledge, and to which exact knowledge always refers with 
pride as to its subject and vassal, actually denies positivism as a whole. Mathematics 
was included in the cycle of positivist sciences only through misunderstanding, and 
soon the chief weapon 
AGAINST POSITIVISM 
will be precisely -mathematics. 
I call here positivism that system which asserts, in opposition to Kant, that the study 
of phenomena 
can
bring us nearer to things in themselves, i.e. which affirms that 
through studying phenomena we can come to the understanding of causes. Moreover, 
and most important as an indication, positivism looks for causes of biological and 
psychological phenomena in physico-mechanical phenomena. 
The usual positivist view denies the existence of the