traditionally, most of those who have of-fered answers to these questions can be placed in one of two schools of thought-rationalism or empiricism. the rationalists hold that human reason alone can discover the basic principles of the universe. the empiricists claim that all knowledge is ultimately derived from sense expe-rience and, thus, that our knowledge is limited to what can be experienced. it should be clear that there is a necessary relation between metaphysics and epistemology. our conception of reality depends on our understanding of ourselves in re-lation to the whole of reality.