The Startling Strangeness

"For the appropriation of one's own rational self-consciousness, which has been so stressed in this introduction, is not an end in itself but rather a beginning.  It is a necessary beginning, for unless one breaks the duality in one's knowing, one doubts that understanding correctly is knowing.  Under the pressure of that doubt, either one will sink into the bog of a knowing that is without understanding, or else one will cling to an understanding but sacrifice knowing on the altar of an immanentism, an idealism, a relativism.  From the horns of that dilemma one escapes only through the discovery (and one has not yet made it if one has no clear memory of its startling strangeness) that there are two quite different realisms, that there is an incoherent realism, half animal and half human, that poses as a half-way house between materialism and idealism and, on the other hand, that there is an intelligent and reasonable realism between which and materialism the half-way house is idealism".