Immanuel Kant’s epistemologic perspective is a blend of both rationalism and empiricism and has implications for his theory of metaphysic of transcendental idealism. Kant was educated in the rationalistic tradition, but under the influence of David Hume Kant became more sensitive to the Empiricistic perspective. In short, Kant's approach was a synthesis of the rationalistic and empiricistic perspectives. According to Kant, reason provides the structure of what we know while experience provides the content of what we know.
As a rationalist, Kant concluded that there are built in or categories of the mind. In other words, while the mind is a blank slate, it also contains innate categories such as space, time, quantity, qualities, relationships, and modality. According to Kant, the individual mind takes ideas and interprets them in light of these categories. Regarding those categories, Kant specified,
1. Space: We do not perceive space since space is not actually an object but is "nothingness"; however, we do perceive objects in space. Space is actually the nothing between the objects.
2. Time: Time as the individual experiences it does not move at the same rate with all individuals. There is a variation of time from individual to individual.
3. Quantity: The individual's mind is innately capable of interpretation of such things as plurality, totality, and unity. The ability to do so is "hardwired" into the human mind.
4. Qualities: The individuals' mind is capable of interpretation of sensory data through categories such as the real and the not real.
5. Relationship: The individual mind comprehends things in relationship to one another through such categories as cause and effect and reciprocity.
6. Modality: The mind is capable of interpretation and categorization through an innate awareness of things such as possibility and impossibility and necessary and unnecessary.
All of these categories, according to Kant, are subjective. They are built into the mind, so to speak, with the result that we cannot know for certain the extent to which they are part of the real world. The mind literally transforms our sensations from the external world (sensory perceptions) into ideas. Therefore, sensory data is turned into an idea and is stored for future reference. Again, regarding the external world, Kant concluded that one does not actually perceive the object itself. Rather, the individual only perceives what the object appears to be. For Kant, there were two categories for reality.
Kant's understood reality as consisting of three worlds. The first world or level of reality proposed by Kant was that of the Human Mind. For Kant, the world of the human mind lies within the person and consists of knowledge derived from the second world or Phenomenal World. The Phenomenal World is that which can only be sensed or the world of empirical observation. However Kant was not content to conclude with these two dimensions of reality. For Kant there was a level of knowledge and a level of reality, which was not apriori or aposteriori, not comprehended by human reason or by the individual senses. This is the world of "God" and the "soul." Kant labeled this third level of reality as the Transcendental World.
