which the critique of cognition must begin must contain nothing doubtful or questionable. They must contain none of that which precipitates epistemological confusion and gives impetus to the critique of cognition. We have to show that this holds true of the sphere of the cogitatio. For this we need a more deeply probing reflection, one that will bring us substantial advantages. If we look closer at what is so enigmatic and what, in the course of subsequent reflection on the possibility of cognition, causes embarrassment, we will find it to be the transcendence of cognition. All cognition of the natural sort, and especially the prescientific, is cognition which makes its object transcendent. It posits objects as existent, claims to reach matters of fact which are not "strictly given to it," are not "immanent" to it. But on closer view, this transcendence is admittedly ambiguous. One thing one can mean by transcendence is that the object of cognition is not genuinely (reel!) contained in the cognitive act so that one would be meaning by "being truly given" or "immanently given" that the object of the cognitive act is genuinely contained in the act: the cognitive act, the cogitatio, has genuine abstract parts genuinely constituting it: but the physical thing which it intends or supposedly perceives or remembers, etc., is not to be found in the cogitatio itself, as a mental process; the physical thing is not to be found as a genuine (reell) concrete part (Stuck), not as something which really exists within the cogitatio. So the question is: how can the mental process so to speak transcend itself? Immanent here means then genuinely (reell) immanent in the cognitive mental process. But there is still another transcendence whose opposite is an altogether different immanence, namely, absolute and cleargivenness, self-givenness in the absolute sense. This givenness, which rules out any meaningful doubt, consists of a simply immediate "seeing" and apprehending of the intended object itself as it is, and it constitutes the precise concept of evidence (Evidenz) understood as immediate evidence. All cognition which is not evident, which though it intends or posits something objective yet does not see it itself, is transcendent in this second sense. In such cognition we go beyond what at any time is truly given, beyond what can be directly ÇseenÈ and apprehended. At this point we may ask: How can cognition posit something as existing that is not directly and truly given in it? At first, before we come to a deeper level of critical epistemological re?flection, these two kinds of immanence and