Claim. Cognition is accomplished through three sequential stages — sensory (formation), understanding (growth), and rational (completion) — mirroring the three stages by which all created things grow, with outer give-and-take forming the sense image, inner identity-maintaining give-and-take forming unified cognition through collation, and inner developmental give-and-take generating new knowledge through reasoning.
Elaboration. Lee maps the formation-growth-completion-stages schema directly onto epistemology (E. Process of Cognition): ‘cognition is accomplished through the three stages of formation, growth and completion, namely, a sensory stage, an understanding stage, and a rational stage, in the same manner as that in which all things grow through the three stages of formation, growth, and completion.’
Stage 1 (Sensory / Formation): An outer identity-maintaining four position foundation forms. Give-and-receive action between subject and object reflects the object’s content and form into the subject’s sensory centers, producing a fragmentary ‘sense image.’ Prototypes have not yet actively participated; it is not yet clear what the object is.
Stage 2 (Understanding / Growth): An inner identity-maintaining four position foundation forms. The sense image (now in the inner Hyungsang position) is collated against the prototype drawn from memory by the spiritual apperception (inner Sungsang in the subject position). Judgment of agreement or disagreement is made — and this collation IS cognition. Sometimes one cognitive cycle is insufficient and inner give-and-take continues alongside practice (experiments, observations) until clarity is obtained.
Stage 3 (Rational / Completion): An inner developmental four position foundation forms (3. Rational Stage of Cognition). This is thinking proper — reasoning that produces NEW knowledge by collation-type give-and-take among already-existing ideas in the inner Hyungsang. Necessary ideas are chosen, association/separation/synthesis/analysis are performed. Example: comparing ‘man’ and ‘boy’ yields the new idea ‘father and son’; comparing ‘society’ and ‘system’ yields ‘social system.’ Each completed judgment is transmitted back to the inner Hyungsang and used in subsequent reasoning, so knowledge develops by repetitive formation of inner four-position foundations.
The Logic-chapter treatment (The Stage of Understanding and the Stage of Reason) adds two corroborations. First, the same triad recurs in other systems: Kant distinguishes intuition (sensory), understanding, and reason; Marxism distinguishes a sensory stage, a logical/rational stage, and a stage of practice where truth is verified. Second, the stages map onto cerebral physiology — the sensory centers, the parietal association area, and the frontal association area respectively.
The schema’s elegance is that it makes epistemology continuous with ontology — cognitive development obeys the same three-stage structure as biological growth and creation itself. The rational stage parallels Logos-formation in the Original Image (inner developmental four-position foundation in creation): thinking creates knowledge in the same way God creates beings, by the same formal mechanism.
See also. ut-cognition-as-collation-not-reflection-or-synthesis, law-of-completion-through-three-stages, spiral-development-of-thinking-in-reason