of view—just as in ethics and the theory of value—is neither autonomy nor
heteronomy; it is orthonomy. The correct point of view for theoretical reason is neither Ptolemaic nor Copernican. Knowledge is not to be fitted to the things, nor are the things to be fitted to our knowledge. Certain judgements about the things, however, are judgements as they ought to be; they are justified in themselves, seen to be correct, and therefore they are the norms for what is true and false, correct and incorrect. A judgement contradicting a judgement which constitutes knowledge cannot possibly be evident—that is to say, it cannot possibly constitute knowledge itself. Descartes intends precisely this point with his “Quod clare et distincte percipio verum est”; Spinoza is even clearer in Proposition 43 of Book II of the Ethics, where we find that the subtle questions about “logical presuppositions” have already been exposed and repudiated. For he exclaims: “Who can know that he knows a thing unless first of all he knows the thing? That is to say, who can know that he has certainty with respect to a thing, unless first of all he does have certainty with respect to the thing? What can serve as a clearer and more certain norm of the truth than a true idea? As light reveals itself and darkness, truth is the norm both of itself and of falsehood.”* The Sophist Protagoras expressed the creed of all subjectivists and relativists with his doctrine “Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, of those that are not that they are not.” Neither Plato’s flight to the transcendent realm of ideas, nor the more mundane correspondence theory of Aristotle, nor even the transcendental method of Kant and the Kantians with its “Copernican revolution”, could completely uproot the doctrine of Protagoras. But all these attempts were necessary in order that proper correction to the homo-mensura could finally be formulated: the one who judges with insight, that is to say, the one who knows, is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are and of those that are not that they are not. Here we have the Archimedean point from which both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican theories of knowledge may be uprooted. It is the logical and epistemological The demise of the correspondence theory, for Brentano, goes hand in hand with the recognition that only things, or realia, can be thought, and that such irrealia as being and non-being, existence and non-existence, possibility and impossibility, states of affairs and truth, are mere fictions. And we may add to this, as already noted, the fact that the correspondence theory involves a vicious circle. The essays and letters published here deal with the correspondence theory partly in general terms and partly in the form of a polemic against Anton Marty and the present editor. They apply, even to a greater extent, to the views of Meinong (compare Brentano’s Psychologie, vol. II, p. 158) and Husserl. Surely one ought to be able to see that nothing whatever is accomplished by the assumption of these ideal and unreal objects, states of affairs, eternal truths, and the highlyprized realm of “eternal values”. The assumption is totally incapable of dealing with relativism and scepticism. If Protagoras says of such “truths” and “values” that they exist only for those who believe in them, and that they do not exist for those who reject them, how is one going to be able to use the “eternal truth” against him? What else can one do * Compare the review, by Oskar Kraus, of Hermann Cohen, in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 1929, No. 30.