On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.
However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.
From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.
The individual always realizes only one of the possibilities in its development, which could always have taken a different turning whenever it has to make an important decision.
No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.
If we conceive all the changes in the physical world as reducible to the motion of atoms, motions generated by means of the fixed nuclear forces of those atoms, the whole of the world could thus be known by means of the natural sciences.
The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.
The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.
Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day.
