When speaking of the modern giant of the history of thought, what come to mind is the name of Emmanuel Kant, the German philosopher. In his genius, he combines the " Empiricist and Rationalist thought through the " Critique of Pure Reason in 1781" that marked the end of "Enlightenment" to initiate a new era called idealism.
In his view, knowledge is impossible without accepting the truth from both Empiricist and Rationalist' school of thought. In this stance he based his Ethics on reason of which moral duties can be deduced by all rational being.
In his view there is uhh a problem with the empiricism method of coming to knowledge.
According to Kant, if all we know and collect are particular sensations or particular impressions, according to the view of the empiricism, how can we then arrive at a necessary and universal knowledge?.
Put in more simple understanding, how can one explain the very possibility of any scientific knowledge and if you like the very relationship that may exist between cause and effect which enable the mind to grasp the scientific truth.
To these turning questions, in taking no side Kant combines the methods to figures out the ways humans come to know things, as he bridge the gap between two schools of thought of the Empiricist and Rationalist.
In this extra ordinary bridging, he refigure the concepts with the result of a new method to knowing things from the human point of view.
Rather than, humans are passive in observing the world, they are indeed, instead active in knowing the world around them.
From the Empiricist point of view, " there can be no doubt, that all knowledge begins from experience". Although, our knowledge begins with experience, but this does not follow that it arises out of experience".
It must be observed, that in what looks like out-side in approach to knowledge of the empiricism, the object tends to causes passive perceivers to have "sensation" according to John Locke, and to have "impression" - according to Hume, according to the English philosophers. However, Kant believed that the categories of "space and time" he called " intuition" were imposed on experience by the human mind in order to make sense out of it."

According to Kant, this is his own " Copernican Revolution" just to remind how "Copernicus rejected the very idea that the sun revolved around the earth". In this way he tends to have solved the problem of how the mind come to acquire knowledge from experience. In this perspective, he made us to understand how the mind imposes principles upon our experience to generate knowledge.
Of cause, these principles reside in our faculty of understanding, according to Kant, like for instance, taken Bread as an example, which is the product of certain content, dough being processed by a form- to make up bread.
The same is true of our knowledge which is a product of content of " what you sense and what you understand - in the space and time as the form of our intuition that work together to result to the knowledge we have at any given time.