True knowledge (prama) apprehends its object as it is; false knowledge apprehends the object as what it is not.
In the Commentary on Valid Cognition (PV III, 194- 224) Dharmakīrti's addresses the issue of whether perception, as a source of knowledge, apprehends distinct spatio-temporal entities as aggregated wholes or aggregation is a conceptual construct and thus outside the domain of perceptual awareness.
Spinoza's "see in one glance" is thus very much like Eliot's "directness of sense"; for both of them the highest form of knowledge involves apprehending a particular problem, idea, situation, or entity in a nondiscursive, immediate, straight-ahead manner of comprehension.
"They [the followers of Alexander] maintain that the material intellect is capable of immortality and subsistence when it reaches that level of perfection where the objects of knowledge that it apprehends are themselves intellects, in particular the Agent Intellect…[material intellect] is immortal when it is united with the Agent Intellect" (Wars, I.8, p. 170).
Knowledge, however, is apprehended by reasoning from ground to consequent.
Since relationship pervades all categories of knowledge, each phenomenon is apprehended in relation to other phenomena.
One consequence of this view, as Plato pointed out in the Theaetetus, is that sense experience cannot be a source of knowledge, because the objects apprehended through it are subject to change.
Mystical experience is alleged to be "noetic," involving knowledge of what a subject apprehends (see James, 1958).
The divide between the full ontological object and the part that has been apprehended shifts as knowledge develops.
His position that knowledge consists in individual minds apprehending ideas in some greater mind would also be recreated by idealists as late as T.H. Green and Josiah Royce in the second half of the nineteenth century, as we will later see.
