Hobbes and Berkeley till Husserl have understood this situation with the relation of sensations (consciousness) and things.
Hobbes detaches sensations with all their derivatives from objects, generating in us sensations: “And though at some certain distance, the real and very object seem invested with the fancy it begets in us; yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another” [8, p. 1-2].
Separation by Thomas Hobbes sensations and objects, in essence, was the basis for the ideas of Berkeley, consisting in the fact that without existence of senses and reason existence of everything else is problematic, because nothing and no one perceive it.
Berkeley believes existence of things only due to their perception by the human mind, or his soul, inasmuch there is no evidence of separate existence of things outside human sensations: “XXIII. But say you, surely there is nothing easier than to imagine Trees, for instance, in a Park, or Books existing in a Closet, and no Body by to perceive them, I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it: But what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your Mind certain ideas which you call Books and Trees, and the same time omitting to frame the Idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you your self perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: It only shews you have the Power of imagining or forming Ideas in your Mind; but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the Objects of your Thought may exist without the Mind: To make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them exist unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest Repugnancy” [9, p. 18].
To the extreme, like Berkeley, Husserl does not come, but he joins to Hobbes and Berkeley in the thought, that meditation of the primary source, or the appearing, is the true source of knowing: “No conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the principle of all principles: that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its “personal” actuality) offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted as what it is presented as being but also only within the limits in which it is presented there. We see indeed that each theory can only again draw its truth itself from originary data. Every statement which does no more than confer expression on such data by simple explication and by means of significations precisely conforming to them is, as we said at the beginning of this chapter actually an absolute beginning called upon to serve as a foundation a principium in the genuine sense of the word” [10, p. 44].
Along with that Husserl, in fact, if truth is adequate to what we call essence, considers that truth is unattainable in full, i.e. as the absolute: “The specific character of certain categories essences is such that essences belonging to them can be given only “onesidedly”, in a sequence “many-sidedly”, yet never “all– sidedly”” [10, p. 8].
Hume treats truth as compliance of thinking to sensations of the person: “We perceive only properties of those forces which are available to senses" [11, p. 22]; “They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of in place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is composed” [11, p. 253].
In its considerations Hume accurately catches that circumstance that primordial source of Whole for human consciousness are namely sensations. In this respect he is quite right, because it is through the senses information comes into control centers of consciousness of the person. Hume also is right in his doubt about existence and qualities of the things which are beyond the senses. Here he is certainly consistent in their views and findings, and differs from other thinkers in that does not take the responsibility to determine aught unknown to him, to speculate on the basis which is impenetrable for him.
However, Hume, like most of thinkers, concentrates the attention not on consciousness, and on the person, and this circumstance, naturally, leads him to not quite adequate conclusions: "… on what base we should think that the same forces will be always combined with the same felt qualities. Therefore, the principal in life is not the mind, but a habit. Only it forces mind in all cases to assume that the future corresponds to the past. How easy did not seem this step, mind never for all eternity would not be able to make it" [11, p. 22]
One can hardly argue with Hume that experience, the habit generated on its basis that is an important factor in human life, the more that Hume rightly pointed out existence of many unknown to us Forces that involves for the person a support preferably on known and clear to him.
Nevertheless, here Hume pulls together the highest consciousness inherent in the person, with the lowest consciousness, belonging to the living beings without self-consciousness. The living beings without self-consciousness really only adapts to the environment by trial and error, accumulating over many generations of genetic memory that allows them to coexist satisfactorily with the environment and to struggle with competitors on the basis of accumulated experiences and genetic memory. But all this doesn't allow living beings without self-consciousness to raise above the environment – in a result, essential change of the environment leads to death of the whole types.
In contrast to the lower consciousness of the living beings without self-consciousness, the higher consciousness of the person is characterized primarily not by mind, which is inherent in all living things in one form or another as centers that process information, incoming from sensations, but by awareness of yourself itself, which implies not just the adoption of the information from sensations and more or less adequate reaction to it, but and the subsequent conscious change of everything that manifests before him and in him.
For this purpose the consciousness in the person has a set of means: imagination, extensive databases, human interaction, intellection of all its forms, purposeful skilled verification of the arriving information, formulation and consolidation of regularities, deduced on the basis of experience and logical processing of information, aspirations for the new, the unknown, producing upheavals in life on the basis of inventions and utilization of fundamental discoveries, etc.
Therefore the habit characteristic only for the layman, who muffles aspirations of own consciousness to the unknown, who prefers to live within already the tested, but not for not strangled consciousness, who always seeks to overcome any circumstances at any cost.
Following Berkeley, Avenarius, denying existence independent of human consciousness reality, believes in this regard that truth is not compliance of consciousness to objective reality, but it is a result of coincidence of the perception of the majority, consistency of data, aspiration to integrity of system of data or as the coherence of sensations: “Here we only noted aspiration for a higher unity, because in it lurks the aspiration to think in the concept of a coherent whole. We could note this fact and on dualism, so as after all its division of the world into two opposites testifies to the thinking, which is addressed to integer; but we thought that the aspiration to finite, higher unity better expresses the need thinking of the totality of things, as understood" [3, §39]; “The final result of our analysis concurs—although not absolutely (durchgehend) in the measure of the various points of view—with that reached by other investigators…” [12, p. 120].
Hegel also joins the aforementioned thinkers in relation to the absolute truth. If we recall the definition of the absolute, which has gave Hegel, namely: “The absolute is the unity of subjective and objective … whereas in fact subjective and objective after all not only are identical but also different” [13, p. 116], then the absolute neither in the current life, nor in thinking can't be.
In terms of the interaction of consciousness and things, identified by consciousness, process of deepening of consciousness in the thing depends on the level of consciousness, which can understand the essence of thing only in accordance with it, moving ahead, for example, from the general concepts "heat" and "cold" to laws of molecular motion in different environments.
Therefore it is inadequate to consider that each step in the knowledge is the absolute truth, moreover it is possible to go deep into the thing infinitely not only because nobody knows its depth but also because consciousness itself changes "jumping" from one level of development on another where things appear before him in other appearance and obey to other regularities.
Perhaps that is why the oldest religion on Earth