Ferrier's Hegelian epistemology (a word that he introduced into English) and ontology are based on the concept of the unity of the act of knowledge, which combines the knowing subject and the object known.
And, second, the act of knowledge depends on its object while the object of knowledge does not depend on the subject's knowledge of it.
Indeed, it is merely information: a 'series of ones and zeroes… a representation or artefact of an earlier act of knowledge performance/production' (Christie 2004, p. 4).
First, the act of knowledge involves a real modification of the knower but not of the object he or she knows.
But while temporality is a property of what God knows and wills, it isn't a property of God's act of knowledge or will.
Whewell explained that "in every act of knowledge … there are two opposite elements, which we may call Ideas and Perceptions" (1860a, 307).
As he put it, "in the judgement of knowledge and the act of knowledge in general we do not combine our apprehensions, but apprehend a combination" (SI, 279), and it is "the nature of the elements themselves" which "determines which unity they have or can have"; the 'apprehending mind' has "no power whatever to make a complex idea out of simple ones" (SI, 524).
Rickert argues that we can tackle the problem of the theory of knowledge in two ways: "One can begin first with an analysis of the real act of knowledge as a psychic process and then, from there, move progressively to determine the transcendent object.
His act of knowledge is essentially an act of love and intelligence combined - of wonder as well as discernment - of opening to a process of mutual discovery.
The contingency of the divine acts of knowledge and will is based on an atemporal causal priority between the powers of knowledge and the will and their acts (178.24 26).
