Humanity's troubles are ceasing in the measure that its mistaken sense of existence is being exchanged for the truth of existence. That is the reason why throughout the centuries the search for knowledge and truth is such a fascinating activity for the more enlightened among mankind.
One of the basic mistakes which have been made in connection with the facts of existence is the discrimination between material things and mental things. A table, a dog, a star, are called material; a thought is called mental. It is not difficult to see that this distinction has no fundamental basis when one considers the simple fact that without consciousness or mentality there would be no existence at all; the so-called material thing would not exist just as the mental thing would not. In other words, the thing we style material must be, and is, materially mental; a phenomenon of finite consciousness; and just as much so as the socalled material things experienced in a dream.
One of the most prominent German philosophers, Immanuel Kant (who lived during the eighteenth century), saw something on this order when he declared that our knowledge of things is restricted to the, necessarily mental, impressions we receive of these things. "Das Ding an sich" (the thing as it is) must be considered as unknowable, according to the sage of Konigsberg. He discerned rightly that mankind is constantly dealing with mental pictures, but his approach to the problem of the explanation of existence from within the problem itself—that is, from the standpoint of material sense—prevented him from seeing sufficiently beyond material limitations.
