KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH MEDIATED BY SYMBOLS
In the claims of memory I have a typical instance of what is called
knowledge. In remembering I believe that I am taking cognisance not of a
given essence but of a remote existence, so that, being myself here and
now, I can consider and describe something going on at another place and
time. This leap, which renders knowledge essentially faith, may come to
seem paradoxical or impossible like the leap of physical being from
place to place or from form to form which is called motion or change,
and which some philosophers deny, as they deny knowledge. Is there such
a leap in knowing? Am I really here and now when I apprehend some remote
thing? Certainly, if by myself I understand the psyche within my body,
which directs my outer organs, reacts on external things, and shapes the
history and character of the individual animal that bears my name. In
this sense I am a physical being in the midst of nature, and my
knowledge is a name for the effects which surrounding things have upon
me, in so far as I am quickened by them, and readjusted to them. I am
certainly confined at each moment to a limited space and time, but may
be quickened by the influence of things at any distance, and may be
readjusting myself to them. For the naturalist there is accordingly no
paradox in the leap of knowledge other than the general marvel of
material interaction and animal life.
If by myself, however, I meant pure spirit, or the light of attention by
which essences appear and intuitions are rendered actual, it would not
be true that I am confined or even situated in a particular place and
time, nor that in considering things remote from my body, my thoughts
are taking any unnatural leap. The marvel, from the point of view of
spirit, is rather that it should need to be planted at all in the
sensorium of some living animal, and that, being rooted there, it should
take that accidental station for its point of view in surveying all
nature, and should dignify one momentary phase of that animal life with
the titles of the Here and the Now. It is only spirit, be it observed,
that can do this. In themselves all the points of space-time are equally
central and palpitating, and every phase of every psyche is a focus for
actual readjustments to the whole universe. How then can the spirit,
which would seem to be the principle of universality and justice, take
up its station in each of these atoms and fight its battles for it, and
prostitute its own light in the service of that desperate blindness? Can
reason do nothing better than supply the eloquence of prejudice? Such
are the puzzles which spirit might find, I will not say in the leap of
knowledge, but in the fatality which links the spirit to a material
organ so that, in order to reach other things, it is obliged to leap; or
rather can never reach other things, because it is tethered to its
starting-point, except by its intent in leaping, and cannot even
discover the stepping-stone on which it stands because its whole life is
the act of leaping away from it. There is no reason, therefore, in so
far as knowledge is an apanage of spirit, why knowledge should not bathe
all time and all existence in an equal light, and see everything as it
is, with an equal sympathy and immediacy. The problem for the spirit is
how it could ever come to pick out one body or another for its cynosure
and for its instrument, as if it could not see save through such a
little eye-glass, and in such a violent perspective. This problem, I
think, has a ready answer, but it is not one that spirit could ever find
of itself, without a long and docile apprenticeship in the school of
animal faith. This answer is that spirit, with knowledge and all its
other prerogatives, is intrinsically and altogether a function of animal
life; so that if it were not lodged in some body and expressive of its
rhythms and relations, spirit would not exist at all. But this solution,
even when spirit is humble enough to accept it, always seems to it a
little disappointing and satirical.
Spirit, therefore, has no need to leap in order to know, because in its
range as spirit it is omnipresent and omnimodal. Events which are past
or future in relation to the phase of the psyche which spirit expresses
in a particular instance, or events which are remote from that psyche in
space, are not for that reason remote from spirit, or out of its
cognitive range: they are merely hidden, or placed in a particular
perspective for the moment, like the features of a landscape by the
hedges and turns of a road. Just as all essences are equally near to
spirit, and equally fit and easy to contemplate, if only a psyche with
an affinity to those essences happens to arise; so all existing things,
past, future, or infinitely distant, are equally within the range of
knowledge, if only a psyche happens to be directed upon them, and to
choose terms, however poor or fantastic, in which to describe them. In
choosing these terms the psyche creates spirit, for they are essences
given in intuition; and in directing her action or endeavour, backward
or forward, upon those remote events, she creates intent in the spirit,
so that the given essences become descriptions of the things with which
the psyche is then busied.
But how, I may ask, can intent distinguish its hidden object, so that an
image, distorted or faithful, may be truly or falsely projected _there_,
or used to describe _it_? How does the spirit divine that there is such
an object, or where it lies? And how can it appeal to a thing which is
hidden, the object of mere intent, as to a touchstone or standard for
its various descriptions of that object, and say to them, as they
suggest themselves in turn: You are too vague, You are absurd, You are
better, You are absolutely right?
I answer that it does so by animal presumption, positing whatsoever
object instinct is materially predisposed to cope with, as in hunger,
love, fighting, or the expectation of a future. But before developing
this reply, let me make one observation. Since intuition of essence is
not knowledge, knowledge can never lie in an overt comparison of one
datum with another datum given at the same time; even in pure dialectic,
the comparison is with a datum _believed_ to have been given formerly.
If both terms were simply given they would compose a complex essence,
without the least signification. Only when one of the terms is indicated
by intent, without being given exhaustively, can the other term serve to
define the first more fully, or be linked with it in an assertion which
is not mere tautology. An object of faith—and knowledge is one species
of faith—can never, even in the most direct perception, come within the
circle of intuition. Intuition of things is a contradiction in terms. If
philosophers wish to abstain from faith, and reduce themselves to
intuition of the obvious, they are free to do so, but they will thereby
renounce all knowledge, and live on passive illusions. No fact, not even
the fact that these illusions exist, would ever be, or would ever have
been, anything but the false idea that they had existed. There would be
nothing but the realm of essence, without any intuition of any part of
it, nor of the whole: so that we should be driven back to a nihilism
which only silence and death could express consistently; since the least
actual assertion of it, by existing, would contradict it.
Even such acquaintance with the realm of essence as constitutes some
science or recognisable art—like mathematics or music—lies in intending
and positing great stretches of essence not now given, so that the
essences now given acquire significance and become pregnant, to my vital
feeling, with a thousand things which they do not present actually, but
which I know where to look for eventually, and how to await. Suppose a
moment ago I heard a clap of thunder, loud and prolonged, but that the
physical shock has subsided and I am conscious of repose and silence. I
may find some difficulty, although the thing was so recent, in
_rehearsing_ even now the exact volume, tone, and rumblings of that
sound; yet I _know_ the theme perfectly, in the sense that when it
thunders again, I can say with assurance whether the second crash was
longer, louder, or differently modulated. In such a case I have no
longer an intuition of the first thunder-clap, but a memory of it which
is knowledge; and I can define on occasion, up to a certain point and
not without some error, the essence given in that particular past
intuition. Thus even pure essences can become objects of intent and of
tentative knowledge when they are not present in intuition but are
approached and posited indirectly, as the essences given on another
particular occasion or signified by some particular word. The word or
the occasion are natural facts, and my knowledge is focussed upon them
in the first instance by ordinary perception or conception of nature:
and the essence I hope to recover is elicited gradually, imaginatively,
perhaps incorrectly, at the suggestion of those assumed facts, according
to my quickness of wit, or my familiarity with the conventions of that
art or science. In this way it becomes possible and necessary to learn
about essences as if they were things, not initially by a spontaneous
and complete intuition, but by coaxing the mind until possibly, at the
end, it beholds them clearly. This is the sort of intuition which is
mediated by language and by works of fine art; also by logic and
mathematics, as they are learned from teachers and out of books. It is
not happy intuition of some casual datum: it is laborious recovery, up
to a certain point, of the _sort_ of essence somebody else may have
intuited. Whereas intuition, which reveals an essence directly, is not
knowledge, because it has no ulterior object, the designation of some
essence by some sign does convey knowledge, to an intelligent pupil, of
what that essence was. Obviously such divination of essences present
elsewhere, so that they become present here also, in so far as it is
knowledge, is trebly faith. Faith first in the document, as a genuine
natural fact and not a vapid fancy of my own; for instance, belief that
there is a book called the Bible, really handed down from the ancient
Jews and the early Christians, and that I have not merely dreamt of such
a book. Faith then in the significance of that document, that it means
some essence which it is not; in this instance, belief that the sacred
writers were not merely speaking with tongues but were signifying some
intelligible points in history and philosophy. Faith finally in my
success in interpreting that document correctly, so that the essences it
suggests to me now are the very essences it expressed originally: in
other words, the belief that when I read the Bible I understand it as it
was meant, and not fantastically.
I revert now to the question how it is possible to posit an object which
is not a datum, and how without knowing positively what this object is I
can make it the criterion of truth in my ideas. How can I test the
accuracy of descriptions by referring them to a subject-matter which is
not only out of view now but which probably has never been more than an
object of intent, an event which even while it was occurring was
described by me only in terms native to my fancy? If I know a man only
by reputation, how should I judge if the reputation is deserved? If I
know things only by representations, are not the representations the
only things I know?
This challenge is fundamental, and so long as the assumptions which it
makes are not challenged in turn, it drives critics of knowledge
inexorably to scepticism of a dogmatic sort, I mean to the assertion
that the very notion of knowledge is absurd. One assumption is that
knowledge should be intuition: but I have already come to the conclusion
that intuition is not knowledge. So long as a knowledge is demanded that
shall be intuition, the issue can only be laughter or despair; for if I
attain intuition, I have only a phantom object, and if I spurn that and
turn to the facts, I have renounced intuition. This assumption alone
suffices, therefore, to disprove the possibility of knowledge. But in
case the force of this disproof escaped us, another assumption is at
hand to despatch the business, namely, the assumption that in a true
description—if we grant knowledge by description—the terms should be
identical with the constituents of the object, so that the idea should
_look like_ the thing that it knows. This assumption is derived from the
other, or is a timid form of it: for it is supposed that I know by
intuiting my idea, and that unless that idea resembled the object I wish
to know, I could not even by courtesy be said to have discovered the
latter. But the intuition of an idea, let me repeat, is not knowledge;
and if a thing resembling that idea happened to exist, my intuition
would still not be knowledge of it, but contemplation of the idea only.
Plato and many other philosophers, being in love with intuition (for
which alone they were perhaps designed by nature), have identified
science with certitude, and consequently entirely condemned what I call
knowledge (which is a form of animal faith) or relegated it to an
inferior position, as something merely necessary for life. I myself have
no passionate attachment to existence, and value this world for the
intuitions it can suggest, rather than for the wilderness of facts that
compose it. To turn away from it may be the deepest wisdom in the end.
What better than to blow out the candle, and to bed! But at noon this
pleasure is premature. I can always hold it in reserve, and perhaps
nihilism is a system—the simplest of all—on which we shall all agree in
the end. But I seem to see very clearly now that in doing so we should
all be missing the truth: not indeed by any false assertion, such as may
separate us from the truth now, but by dumb ignorance—a dumb ignorance
which, when proposed as a solution to actual doubts, is the most radical
of errors, since it ignores and virtually denies the pressure of those
doubts, and their living presence. Accordingly, so long as I remain
awake and the light burning, that total dogmatic scepticism is evidently
an impossible attitude. It requires me to deny what I assert, not to
mean what I mean, and (in the sense in which seeing is believing) not to
believe what I see. If I wish, therefore, to formulate in any way my
actual claim to knowledge—a claim which life, and in particular memory,
imposes upon me—I must revise the premisses of this nihilism. For I have
been led to it not by any accidental error, but by the logic of the
assumption that knowledge should be intuition of fact. It is this
presumption that must be revoked.
Knowledge is no such thing. It is not intramental nor internal to
experience. Not only does it not require me to compare two given terms
and to find them similar or identical, but it positively excludes any
intuitive possession of its object. Intuition subsists beneath
knowledge, as vegetative life subsists beneath animal life, and within
it. Intuition may also supervene upon knowledge, when all I have learned
of the universe, and all my concern for it, turn to a playful or a
hypnotising phantom; and any poet or philosopher, like any flower, is
free to prefer intuition to knowledge. But in preferring intuition he
prefers ignorance. Knowledge is knowledge because it has compulsory
objects that pre-exist. It is incidental to the predicaments and labour
of life: also to its masterful explorations and satirical moods. It is
reflected from events as light is reflected from bodies. It expresses in
discourse the modified habits of an active being, plastic to experience,
and capable of readjusting its organic attitude to other things on the
same material plane of being with itself. The place and the pertinent
functions of these several things are indicated by the very attitude of
the animal who notices them; this attitude, physical and practical,
determines the object of intent, which discourse is about.
When the proverbial child cries for the moon, is the object of his
desire doubtful? He points at it unmistakably; yet the psychologist (not
to speak of the child himself) would have some difficulty in recovering
exactly the sensations and images, the gathering demands and fumbling
efforts, that traverse the child’s mind while he points. Fortunately all
this fluid sentience, even if it could be described, is irrelevant to
the question; for the child’s sensuous experience is not his object. If
it were, he would have attained it. What his object is, his fixed gaze
and outstretched arm declare unequivocally. His elders may say that he
doesn’t know what he wants, which is probably true of them also: that
is, he has only a ridiculously false and inconstant idea of what the
moon may be in itself. But his attention is arrested in a particular
direction, his appetition flows the same way; and if he may be said to
know anything, he knows there is something there which he would like to
reach, which he would like to know better. He is a little philosopher;
and his knowledge, if less diversified and congealed, is exactly like
science.
The attitude of his body in pointing to the moon, and his tears, fill
full his little mind, which not only reverberates to this physical
passion, but probably observes it: and this felt attitude _identifies
the object_ of his desire and knowledge _in the physical world_. It
determines what particular thing, in the same space and time with the
child’s body, was the object of that particular passion. If the object
which the body is after is identified, that which the soul is after is
identified too: no one, I suppose, would carry dualism so far as to
assert that when the mouth waters at the sight of one particular plum,
the soul may be yearning for quite another.
The same bodily attitude of the child _identifies the object in the
discourse of an observer_. In perceiving what his senses are excited by,
and which way his endeavour is turned, I can see that the object of his
desire is the moon, which I too am looking at. That I am looking at the
same moon as he can be proved by a little triangulation: our glances
converge upon it. If the child has reached the inquisitive age and asks
“What is that?” I understand what he means by “that” and am able to
reply sapiently “That is the moon,” only because our respective bodies,
in one common space, are discoverably turned towards one material
object, which is stimulating them simultaneously. Knowledge of discourse
in other people, or of myself at other times, is what I call literary
psychology. It is, or may be, in its texture, the most literal and
adequate sort of knowledge of which a mind is capable. If I am a lover
of children, and a good psycho-analyst, I may feel for a moment exactly
as the child feels in looking at the moon: and I may know that I know
his feeling, and very likely he too will know that I know it, and we
shall become fast friends. But this rare adequacy of knowledge, attained
by dramatic sympathy, goes out to an object which in its existence is
known very indirectly: because poets and religious visionaries feel this
sort of sympathy with all sorts of imaginary persons, of whose existence
and thoughts they have only intuition, not knowledge. If I ask for
evidence that such an object exists, and is not an _alter ego_ of my
private invention, I must appeal to my faith in nature, and to my
conventional assumption that this child and I are animals of the same
species, in the same habitat, looking at the same moon, and likely to
have the same feelings: and finally the psychology of the tribe and the
crowd may enable me half to understand how we know that we have the same
feelings at once, when we actually share them.
The attitude of the child’s body also _identifies the object for him, in
his own subsequent discourse_. He is not likely to forget a moon that he
cried for. When in stretching his hand towards it he found he could not
touch it, he learned that this bright good was not within his grasp, and
he made a beginning in the experience of life. He also made a beginning
in science, since he then added the absolutely true predicate “out of
reach” to the rather questionable predicates “bright” and “good” (and
perhaps “edible”) with which his first glimpse had supplied him. That
active and mysterious thing, co-ordinate with himself, since it lay in
the same world with his body, and affected it—the thing that attracted
his hand, was evidently the very thing that eluded it. His failure would
have had no meaning and would have taught him nothing—that is, would not
have corrected his instinctive reactions—if the object he saw and the
object he failed to reach had not been identical; and certainly that
object was not brightness nor goodness nor excitements in his brain or
psyche, for these are not things he could ever have attempted or
expected to touch. It is only things on the scale of the human senses
and in the field of those instinctive reactions which sensation calls
forth, that can be the primary objects of human knowledge: no other
things can be discriminated at first by an animal mind, or can interest
it, or can be meant and believed in by it. It is these instinctive
reactions that select the objects of attention, designate their locus,
and impose faith in their existence. But these reactions may be modified
by experience, and the description the mind gives of the objects reacted
upon can be revised, or the objects themselves discarded, and others
discerned instead. Thus the child’s instinct to touch the moon was as
spontaneous and as confident at first as his instinct to look at it; and
the object of both efforts was the same, because the same external
agency aroused them, and with them the very heterogeneous sensations of
light and of disappointment. These various terms of sense or of
discourse, by which the child described the object under whose
attractions and rebuffs he was living, were merely symbols to him, like
words. An animal naturally has as many signs for an object as he has
sensations or emotions in its presence. These signs are miscellaneous
essences—sights, sounds, smells, contacts, tears, provocations—and they
are alternative or supplementary to one another, like words in different
languages. The most diverse senses, such as smell and sight, if summoned
to the same point in the environment, and guiding a single action, will
report upon a single object. Even when one sense brings all the news I
have, its reports will change from moment to moment with the distance,
variation, or suspension of the connection between the object and my
body: and this without any relevant change in the object itself. Nay,
often the very transformation of the sensation bears witness that the
object is unchanged; as music and laughter, overheard as I pass a
tavern, are felt and known to continue unabated, and to be no merriment
of mine, just because they fade from my ears as I move away.
The object of knowledge being that designated in this way by my bodily
attitude, the æsthetic qualities I attribute to it will depend on the
particular sense it happens to affect at the moment, or on the sweep and
nature of the reaction which it then calls forth on my part. This
diversity in signs and descriptions for a single thing is a normal
diversity. Diversity, when it is not contradiction, irritates only
unreasonably dogmatic people; they are offended with nature for having a
rich vocabulary, and sometimes speaking a language, or employing a
syntax, which they never heard at home. It is an innocent prejudice, and
it yields easily in a generous mind to pleasure at the wealth of
alternatives which animal life affords. Even such contradictions as may
arise in the description of things, and may truly demand a solution,
reside in the implication of the terms, not in their sensuous or
rhetorical diversity: they become contradictory only when they assign to
the object contrary movements or contrary effects, not when they merely
exhibit its various appearances. Looking at the moon, one man may call
it simply a light in the sky; another, prone to dreaming awake, may call
it a virgin goddess; a more observant person, remembering that this
luminary is given to waxing and waning, may call it the crescent; and a
fourth, a full-fledged astronomer, may say (taking the æsthetic essence
before him merely for a sign) that it is an extinct and opaque
spheroidal satellite of the earth, reflecting the light of the sun from
a part of its surface. All these descriptions envisage the same
object—otherwise no relevance, conflict, or progress could obtain among
them. What that object is in its complete constitution and history will
never be known by man; but that this object exists in a known space and
time and has traceable physical relations with all other physical
objects is a fact posited from the beginning; it was posited by the
child when he pointed, and by me when I saw him point. If it did not so
exist and (as sometimes happens) he and I were suffering from a
hallucination, in thinking we were pointing at the moon we should be
discoverably pointing at vacancy: exploration would eventually satisfy
us of that fact, and any bystander would vouch for it. But if in
pointing at it we were pointing to it, its identity would be fixed
without more ado; disputes and discoveries concerning it would be
pertinent and soluble, no matter what diversity there might be in the
ideal essences—light, crescent, goddess, or satellite—which we used as
rival descriptions of it while we pointed.
I find that the discrimination of essence brings a wonderful clearness
into this subject. All data and descriptions—light, crescent, goddess,
or satellite—are equally essences, terms of human discourse, in-existent
in themselves. What exists in any instance, besides the moon and our
various reactions upon it, is some intuition, expressing those
reactions, evoking that essence, and lending it a specious actuality.
The terms of astronomy are essences no less human and visionary than
those of mythology; but they are the fruit of a better focussed, more
chastened, and more prolonged attention turned upon what actually
occurs; that is, they are kept closer to animal faith, and freer from
pictorial elements and the infusion of reverie. In myth, on the
contrary, intuition wanders idly and uncontrolled; it makes epicycles,
as it were, upon the reflex arc of perception; the moonbeams bewitch
some sleeping Endymion, and he dreams of a swift huntress in heaven.
Myth is nevertheless a relevant fancy, and genuinely expressive; only
instead of being guided by a perpetual fresh study of the object posited
by animal faith and encountered in action, it runs into marginal
comments, personal associations, and rhetorical asides; so that even if
based originally on perception, it is built upon principles internal to
human discourse, as are grammar, rhyme, music, and morals. It may be
admirable as an expression of these principles, and yet be egregiously
false if asserted of the object, without discounting the human medium in
which it has taken form. Diana is an exquisite symbol for the moon, and
for one sort of human loveliness; but she must not be credited with any
existence over and above that of the moon, and of sundry short-skirted
Dorian maidens. She is not other than they: she is an image of them, the
best part of their essence distilled in a poet’s mind. So with the
description of the moon given by astronomers, which is not less
fascinating; this, too, is no added object, but only a new image for the
moon known even to the child and me. The space, matter, gravitation,
time, and laws of motion conceived by astronomers are essences only, and
mere symbols for the use of animal faith, when very enlightened: I mean
in so far as they are alleged to constitute knowledge of a world which I
must bow to and encounter in action; for if astronomy is content to be a
mathematical exercise without any truth, an object of pure intuition,
its terms and its laws will, of course, be ultimate realities, apart
from what happens to exist: realities in the realm of essence. In the
description of the natural world, however, they are mere symbols,
mediating animal faith. Science at any moment may recast or correct its
conceptions (as it is doing now) giving them a different colour; and the
nerve of truth in them will be laid bare and made taut in proportion as
the sensuous and rhetorical vesture of these notions is stripped off,
and the dynamic relations of events, as found and posited by material
exploration, are nakedly recorded.
Knowledge accordingly is belief: belief in a world of events, and
especially of those parts of it which are near the self, tempting or
threatening it. This belief is native to animals, and precedes all
deliberate use of intuitions as signs or descriptions of things; as I
turn my head to see who is there, before I see who it is. Furthermore,
knowledge is true belief. It is such an enlightening of the self by
intuitions arising there, that what the self imagines and asserts of the
collateral thing, with which it wrestles in action, is actually true of
that thing. Truth in such presumptions or conceptions does not imply
adequacy, nor a pictorial identity between the essence in intuition and
the constitution of the object. Discourse is a language, not a mirror.
The images in sense are parts of discourse, not parts of nature: they
are the babble of our innocent organs under the stimulus of things; but
these spontaneous images, like the sounds of the voice, may acquire the
function of names; they may become signs, if discourse is intelligent
and can recapitulate its phases, for the things sought or encountered in
the world. The truth which discourse can achieve is truth in its own
terms, appropriate description: it is no incorporation or reproduction
of the object in the mind. The mind notices and intends; it cannot
incorporate or reproduce anything not an intention or an intuition. Its
objects are no part of itself even when they are essences, much less
when they are things. It thinks the essences, with that sort of
immediate and self-forgetful attention which I have been calling
intuition; and if it is animated, as it usually is, by some ulterior
interest or pursuit, it takes the essences before it for messages,
signs, or emanations sent forth to it from those objects of animal
faith; and they become its evidences and its description for those
objects. Therefore any degree of inadequacy and originality is tolerable
in discourse, or even requisite, when the constitution of the objects
which the animal encounters is out of scale with his organs, or quite
heterogeneous from his possible images. A sensation or a theory, no
matter how arbitrary its terms (and all language is perfectly
arbitrary), will be true of the object, if it expresses some true
relation in which that object stands to the self, so that these terms
are not misleading as signs, however poetical they may be as sounds or
as pictures.
Finally, knowledge is true belief grounded in experience, I mean,
controlled by outer facts. It is not true by accident; it is not shot
into the air on the chance that there may be something it may hit. It
arises by a movement of the self sympathetic or responsive to
surrounding beings, so that these beings become its intended objects,
and at the same time an appropriate correspondence tends to be
established between these objects and the beliefs generated under their
influence.
In regard to the original articles of the animal creed—that there is a
world, that there is a future, that things sought can be found, and
things seen can be eaten—no guarantee can possibly be offered. I am sure
these dogmas are often false; and perhaps the event will some day
falsify them all, and they will lapse altogether. But while life lasts,
in one form or another this faith must endure. It is the initial
expression of animal vitality in the sphere of mind, the first
announcement that anything is going on. It is involved in any pang of
hunger, of fear, or of love. It launches the adventure of knowledge. The
object of this tentative knowledge is things in general, whatsoever may
be at work (as I am) to disturb me or awake my attention. The effort of
knowledge is to discover what sort of world this disturbing world
happens to be. Progress in knowledge lies open in various directions,
now in the scope of its survey, now in its accuracy, now in its depth of
local penetration. The ideal of knowledge is to become natural science:
if it trespasses beyond that, it relapses into intuition, and ceases to
be knowledge.