One of Allamah Tabatabaii’s brilliant innovations is that he has traced back all kinds of conceptual knowledge to that of intuition. This theory says that before perception through concepts or in the mind, one directly feels the very reality and being of things present to one. What is to be taken into serious consideration here is Allamah’s dual explanation of sense perception. The very thing intuitively known in sense perception, once he says, is the material impression in the faculty of sight, but sometimes he says, it is the imaginal form existing in the world of imagination. In what follows, the author has first explained the two approaches, and then shown that they are consistent though different, since each of them belongs to a different phase of man’s position in existence. In fact, Allamah argues that the standard of sense perception is the imaginal forms of the sensible things which might only be observed in the independent world of imagination, since in its initial phases, the soul fails to generate those forms in its own imagination; in its later phases, however, it becomes strong enough to generate those forms in its dependent faculty of imagination.
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