Chapter 10 Part I The World as Representation § 10

In view of all this, the question of how to attain certainty, how to ground judgments, and what constitutes knowledge and science is all the more urgent.And science, along with language and deliberate action, is the third great advantage we call [mankind's] reason, after the latter two. The nature of rationality is feminine, and it can only give something after it has taken it.As far as it is concerned, it has nothing but the empty form in which it works.Purely rational knowledge consists of nothing but those four laws of truth which I call superlogical: the law of identity, the law of contradiction, the law of the excluded middle, and the law of sufficient reason for knowing.The rest of logic itself is not quite pure rational cognition, because these parts presuppose the relations and combinations of the meaning circles of concepts, and concepts are only after the pre-existing intuitive representations. The relation of representations constitutes its whole essence, and the concept presupposes them.But since this assumption concerns not the fixed content of concepts, but only their actual existence in general, logic, taken as a whole, can still be regarded as a purely rational science.In all the other sciences reason receives content derived from intuitive representations: in mathematics it derives from spatial and temporal relations which are intuitively aware of prior experience; In knowledge in which process precedes all experience, the content of science derives from pure understanding, that is, from the a priori knowledge of the law of causality and its union with pure intuition of time and space.All sciences other than this, which do not derive all their [content] from the above-mentioned sources, come from experience. "Knowledge" is basically: under the power of the human mind, there are certain judgments that can be reproduced at will, and these judgments have their sufficient cognitive grounds in other things other than themselves; that is, these judgments are true.Therefore, only abstract cognition is "knowledge", which is conditioned by rationality.Animals have intuitive knowledge though, and the fact that they dream also proves that they have memory of intuitive knowledge; both memory and, of course, imagination.But strictly speaking, we cannot say that animals also know.When we say that animals are conscious, we mean that the concept of consciousness comes from "knowledge" etymologically, but it is consistent with the concept of representation, no matter what kind of representation it is.Therefore we say that plants are alive but unconscious.Therefore, "knowledge" is abstract consciousness, and it is the function of fixing everything known in other ways in rational concepts.