category or function, which gives knowledge of things in their
concretion and individuality?

[Sidenote] _Intuition and sensation._

Having thus freed intuitive knowledge from any suggestion of
intellectualism and from every posterior and external adjunct, we must
now make clear and determine its limits from another side and from a
different kind of invasion and confusion. On the other side, and before
the inferior boundary, is sensation, formless matter, which the spirit
can never apprehend in itself, in so far as it is mere matter. This it
can only possess with form and in form, but postulates its concept as,
precisely, a limit. Matter, in its abstraction, is mechanism, passivity;
it is what the spirit of man experiences, but does not produce. Without
it no human knowledge and activity is possible; but mere matter produces
animality, whatever is brutal and impulsive in man, not the spiritual
dominion, which is humanity. How often do we strive to understand
clearly what is passing within us? We do catch a glimpse of something,
but this does not appear to the mind as objectified and formed. In such
moments it is, that we best perceive the profound difference between
matter and form. These are not two acts of ours, face to face with one
another; but we assault and carry off the one that is outside us, while
that within us tends to absorb and make its own that without. Matter,
attacked and conquered by form, gives place to concrete form. It is the
matter, the content, that differentiates one of our intuitions from
another: form is constant: it is spiritual activity, while matter is
changeable. Without matter, however, our spiritual activity would not
leave its abstraction to become concrete and real, this or that
spiritual content, this or that definite intuition.