Kant's merger of rationalism and empiricism
...her sensations. The senses perceive them but there needs to be a mind with reason to ascribe the sensations to an object. In Kant’s thinking, when a person looks into a room, he doesn’t see the random assortment of colours and feelings, but objects which the mind creates that possess all the qualities our senses perceive. Using both reason and experience is a compromise between the rationalist and empiricist views of Kant’s predecessors. Another attempt to reconcile the two ideologies is the organization of sensations into categories by the mind. The senses are perceived and put into separate mental categories, very similar to Plato’s forms. One of these categories is the casual relationship. The mind injects a cause and effect relation into the world it perceives. For example, when a car crashes into a fence, you use your senses to see a moving grey mass rapidly approaching a stationary brown mass. According to Kant’s arguments, the mind organizes this into the objects of the car being stopped by the object of the fence. The fence causes the car to stop. The different relationships are used by the reason to make sense out of sensations. Kant believed that space and time were also mental constructs that the mind used to organize objects. This theory highlights Kant’s slight bias towards the rationalists who believed that the mind controls perception. He says that we can know the categories or forms without using our s...