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How did Immanuel Kant bring together rationalism and empiricism?

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Immanuel Kant German philosopher Immanuel Kant surrounded by Ouroboros, an emblematic serpent of ancient Egypt and Greece, engraving by John Chapman, published in London, 1812.

Immanuel Kant bridged the divide between rationalism and empiricism through his doctrine of transcendental idealism. He argued that while all knowledge begins with experience, it is not entirely derived from it.1

Kant proposed that the human mind is not a passive recipient of data but an active participant in constructing knowledge. He posited that the mind imposes specific a priori structures—such as the forms of space and time and the categories of the understanding (like causality)—onto the raw sensory data provided by experience. This synthesis allows for synthetic a priori judgments, which are necessary and universal truths about the world of experience.213

By asserting that objects must conform to the requirements of human sensibility and rationality, Kant initiated a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy. He maintained that we can only know phenomena (things as they appear to us), while things-in-themselves (noumena) remain fundamentally unknowable.214