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In order to accurately understand how Kant bridged the gap between the rationalist method of understanding and knowledge and the empiricists, you must first separate and define the two. The rationalist point of view stemmed from Plato, and was acclaimed by many other great philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. They believed that reason alone is the ultimate source of knowledge. They believed that all truths could be obtained through a prior knowledge, or innate knowledge. They felt that the world of sense experience is not the real world at all. The only way to see true reality is through reason. A prior defines faculty. The Empiricist point of view claims knowledge depends on sense experience. After advances in science, particularly Newton’s success in physics, philosophers such as Lock and Hume gained increasing potency to their empirical beliefs. They believed science is the most concrete tool for discerning the intricacies of knowledge. Kant