Experience

It was Kant who pointed out that sensuous contact with the objective world did not of itself constitute experience, since without forms through which the sensuous contact with the world can be rationally understood, there can be no experience. (For example, a person totally untrained in geology learns nothing geological from a geological expedition.)

The problem which Kant was unable to solve was the source of these categories which made possible the rational cognition of Experience. While recognising that it was the objective world beyond sensation which was the source of sensation, he restricted knowledge to the “possible objects of experience” and with the later positivists, rejected the possibility of knowledge of that “thing-in-itself” beyond experience.