I
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION [Footnote: Read before the Aristotelian
Society, December 1, 1884, and first published in Mind, vol. x
(1885).--This, and the following articles have received a very slight
verbal revision, consisting mostly in the omission of redundancy.]
The following inquiry is (to use a distinction familiar to readers of
Mr. Shadworth Hodgson) not an inquiry into the 'how it comes,' but
into the 'what it is' of cognition. What we call acts of cognition are
evidently realized through what we call brains and their events, whether
there be 'souls' dynamically connected with the brains or not. But with
neither brains nor souls has this essay any business to transact. In it
we shall simply assume that cognition IS produced, somehow, and limit
ourselves to asking what elements it contains, what factors it implies.
Cognition is a function of consciousness. The first factor it implies
is therefore a state of consciousness wherein the cognition shall take
place. Having elsewhere used the word 'feeling' to designate generically
all states of consciousness considered subjectively, or without respect
to their possible function, I shall then say that, whatever elements an
act of cognition may imply besides, it at least implies the existence
of a FEELING. [If the reader share the current antipathy to the word
'feeling,' he may substitute for it, wherever I use it, the word 'idea,'
taken in the old broad Lockian sense, or he may use the clumsy phrase
'state of consciousness,' or finally he may say 'thought' instead.]
Now it is to be observed that the common consent of mankind has agreed
that some feelings are cognitive and some are simple facts having a
subjective, or, what one might almost call a physical, existence, but
no such self-transcendent function as would be implied in their being
pieces of knowledge. Our task is again limited here. We are not to ask,
'How is self-transcendence possible?' We are only to ask, 'How comes it
that common sense has assigned a number of cases in which it is assumed
not only to be possible but actual? And what are the marks used by
common sense to distinguish those cases from the rest?' In short, our
inquiry is a chapter in descriptive psychology,--hardly anything more.
Condillac embarked on a quest similar to this by his famous hypothesis
of a statue to which various feelings were successively imparted. Its
first feeling was supposed to be one of fragrance. But to avoid all
possible complication with the question of genesis, let us not attribute
even to a statue the possession of our imaginary feeling. Let us rather
suppose it attached to no matter, nor localized at any point in space,
but left swinging IN VACUO, as it were, by the direct creative FIAT of a
god. And let us also, to escape entanglement with difficulties about the
physical or psychical nature of its 'object' not call it a feeling
of fragrance or of any other determinate sort, but limit ourselves
to assuming that it is a feeling of Q. What is true of it under this
abstract name will be no less true of it in any more particular shape
(such as fragrance, pain, hardness) which the reader may suppose.
Now, if this feeling of Q be the only creation of the god, it will of
course form the entire universe. And if, to escape the cavils of that
large class of persons who believe that SEMPER IDEM SENTIRE AC NON
SENTIRE are the same, [Footnote:1 'The Relativity of Knowledge,' held
in this sense, is, it may be observed in passing, one of the oddest of
philosophic superstitions. Whatever facts may be cited in its favor are
due to the properties of nerve-tissue, which may be exhausted by
too prolonged an excitement. Patients with neuralgias that last
unremittingly for days can, however, assure us that the limits of this
nerve-law are pretty widely drawn. But if we physically could get a
feeling that should last eternally unchanged, what atom of logical or
psychological argument is there to prove that it would not be felt as
long as it lasted, and felt for just what it is, all that time? The
reason for the opposite prejudice seems to be our reluctance to think
that so stupid a thing as such a feeling would necessarily be, should
be allowed to fill eternity with its presence. An interminable
acquaintance, leading to no knowledge-about,--such would be its
condition.] we allow the feeling to be of as short a duration as they
like, that universe will only need to last an infinitesimal part of a
second. The feeling in question will thus be reduced to its fighting
weight, and all that befalls it in the way of a cognitive function
must be held to befall in the brief instant of its quickly snuffed-out
life,--a life, it will also be noticed, that has no other moment of
consciousness either preceding or following it.
Well now, can our little feeling, thus left alone in the universe,--for
the god and we psychological critics may be supposed left out of
the account,--can the feeling, I say, be said to have any sort of a
cognitive function? For it to KNOW, there must be something to be known.
What is there, on the present supposition? One may reply, 'the feeling's
content q.' But does it not seem more proper to call this the feeling's
QUALITY than its content? Does not the word 'content' suggest that the
feeling has already dirempted itself as an act from its content as
an object? And would it be quite safe to assume so promptly that the
quality q of a feeling is one and the same thing with a feeling of the
quality q? The quality q, so far, is an entirely subjective fact which
the feeling carries so to speak endogenously, or in its pocket. If
any one pleases to dignify so simple a fact as this by the name of
knowledge, of course nothing can prevent him. But let us keep closer
to the path of common usage, and reserve the name knowledge for the
cognition of 'realities,' meaning by realities things that exist
independently of the feeling through which their cognition occurs. If
the content of the feeling occur nowhere in the universe outside of the
feeling itself, and perish with the feeling, common usage refuses
to call it a reality, and brands it as a subjective feature of the
feeling's constitution, or at the most as the feeling's DREAM.
For the feeling to be cognitive in the specific sense, then, it must be
self-transcendent; and we must prevail upon the god to CREATE A REALITY
OUTSIDE OF IT to correspond to its intrinsic quality Q. Thus only can
it be redeemed from the condition of being a solipsism. If now the new
created reality RESEMBLE the feeling's quality Q I say that the feeling
may be held by us TO BE COGNIZANT OF THAT REALITY.
This first instalment of my thesis is sure to be attacked. But one
word before defending it 'Reality' has become our warrant for calling
a feeling cognitive; but what becomes our warrant for calling anything
reality? The only reply is--the faith of the present critic or inquirer.
At every moment of his life he finds himself subject to a belief in SOME
realities, even though his realities of this year should prove to be his
illusions of the next. Whenever he finds that the feeling he is studying
contemplates what he himself regards as a reality, he must of course
admit the feeling itself to be truly cognitive. We are ourselves the
critics here; and we shall find our burden much lightened by being
allowed to take reality in this relative and provisional way. Every
science must make some assumptions. Erkenntnisstheoretiker are but
fallible mortals. When they study the function of cognition, they do
it by means of the same function in themselves. And knowing that the
fountain cannot go higher than its source, we should promptly confess
that our results in this field are affected by our own liability to
err. THE MOST WE CAN CLAIM IS, THAT WHAT WE SAY ABOUT COGNITION MAY BE
COUNTED AS TRUE AS WHAT WE SAY ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE. If our hearers agree
with us about what are to be held 'realities,' they will perhaps also
agree to the reality of our doctrine of the way in which they are known.
We cannot ask for more.
Our terminology shall follow the spirit of these remarks. We will deny
the function of knowledge to any feeling whose quality or content we do
not ourselves believe to exist outside of that feeling as well as in
it. We may call such a feeling a dream if we like; we shall have to see
later whether we can call it a fiction or an error.
To revert now to our thesis. Some persons will immediately cry out, 'How
CAN a reality resemble a feeling?' Here we find how wise we were to name
the quality of the feeling by an algebraic letter Q. We flank the whole
difficulty of resemblance between an inner state and an outward reality,
by leaving it free to any one to postulate as the reality whatever sort
of thing he thinks CAN resemble a feeling,--if not an outward thing,
then another feeling like the first one,--the mere feeling Q in the
critic's mind for example. Evading thus this objection, we turn to
another which is sure to be urged.
It will come from those philosophers to whom 'thought,' in the sense of
a knowledge of relations, is the all in all of mental life; and who hold
a merely feeling consciousness to be no better--one would sometimes say
from their utterances, a good deal worse--than no consciousness at all.
Such phrases as these, for example, are common to-day in the mouths of
those who claim to walk in the footprints of Kant and Hegel rather than
in the ancestral English paths: 'A perception detached from all others,
"left out of the heap we call a mind," being out of all relation, has no
qualities--is simply nothing. We can no more consider it than we can
see vacancy.' 'It is simply in itself fleeting, momentary, unnameable
(because while we name it it has become another), and for the very same
reason unknowable, the very negation of knowability.' 'Exclude from what
we have considered real all qualities constituted by relation, we find
that none are left.'
Altho such citations as these from the writings of Professor Green might
be multiplied almost indefinitely, they would hardly repay the pains of
collection, so egregiously false is the doctrine they teach. Our little
supposed feeling, whatever it may be, from the cognitive point of view,
whether a bit of knowledge or a dream, is certainly no psychical zero.
It is a most positively and definitely qualified inner fact, with a
complexion all its own. Of course there are many mental facts which it
is NOT. It knows Q, if Q be a reality, with a very minimum of knowledge.
It neither dates nor locates it. It neither classes nor names it. And
it neither knows itself as a feeling, nor contrasts itself with other
feelings, nor estimates its own duration or intensity. It is, in short,
if there is no more of it than this, a most dumb and helpless and
useless kind of thing.
But if we must describe it by so many negations, and if it can say
nothing ABOUT itself or ABOUT anything else, by what right do we deny
that it is a psychical zero? And may not the 'relationists' be right
after all?
In the innocent looking word 'about' lies the solution of this riddle;
and a simple enough solution it is when frankly looked at. A quotation
from a too seldom quoted book, the Exploratio Philosophica of John Grote
(London, 1865), p. 60, will form the best introduction to it.
'Our knowledge,' writes Grote, 'may be contemplated in either of two
ways, or, to use other words, we may speak in a double manner of the
"object" of knowledge. That is, we may either use language thus: we
KNOW a thing, a man, etc.; or we may use it thus: we know such and such
things ABOUT the thing, the man, etc. Language in general, following its
true logical instinct, distinguishes between these two applications
of the notion of knowledge, the one being yvwvai, noscere, kennen,
connaitre, the other being eidevai, scire, wissen, savoir. In
the origin, the former may be considered more what I have called
phenomenal--it is the notion of knowledge as ACQUAINTANCE or familiarity
with what is known; which notion is perhaps more akin to the phenomenal
bodily communication, and is less purely intellectual than the other; it
is the kind of knowledge which we have of a thing by the presentation
to the senses or the representation of it in picture or type, a
Vorstellung. The other, which is what we express in judgments or
propositions, what is embodied in Begriffe or concepts without any
necessary imaginative representation, is in its origin the more
intellectual notion of knowledge. There is no reason, however, why we
should not express our knowledge, whatever its kind, in either manner,
provided only we do not confusedly express it, in the same proposition
or piece of reasoning, in both.'
Now obviously if our supposed feeling of Q is (if knowledge at all) only
knowledge of the mere acquaintance-type, it is milking a he-goat, as
the ancients would have said, to try to extract from it any deliverance
ABOUT anything under the sun, even about itself. And it is as unjust,
after our failure, to turn upon it and call it a psychical nothing, as
it would be, after our fruitless attack upon the billy-goat, to proclaim
the non-lactiferous character of the whole goat-tribe. But the entire
industry of the Hegelian school in trying to shove simple sensation out
of the pale of philosophic recognition is founded on this false issue.
It is always the 'speechlessness' of sensation, its inability to make
any 'statement,'[Footnote: See, for example, Green's Introduction to
Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, p. 36.] that is held to make the very
notion of it meaningless, and to justify the student of knowledge in
scouting it out of existence. 'Significance,' in the sense of standing
as the sign of other mental states, is taken to be the sole function
of what mental states we have; and from the perception that our little
primitive sensation has as yet no significance in this literal sense,
it is an easy step to call it first meaningless, next senseless, then
vacuous, and finally to brand it as absurd and inadmissible. But in
this universal liquidation, this everlasting slip, slip, slip, of direct
acquaintance into knowledge-ABOUT, until at last nothing is left
about which the knowledge can be supposed to obtain, does not all
'significance' depart from the situation? And when our knowledge about
things has reached its never so complicated perfection, must there
not needs abide alongside of it and inextricably mixed in with it some
acquaintance with WHAT things all this knowledge is about?
Now, our supposed little feeling gives a WHAT; and if other feelings
should succeed which remember the first, its WHAT may stand as subject
or predicate of some piece of knowledge-about, of some judgment,
perceiving relations between it and other WHATS which the other feelings
may know. The hitherto dumb Q will then receive a name and be no
longer speechless. But every name, as students of logic know, has its
'denotation'; and the denotation always means some reality or content,
relationless as extra or with its internal relations unanalyzed,
like the Q which our primitive sensation is supposed to know. No
relation-expressing proposition is possible except on the basis of a
preliminary acquaintance with such 'facts,' with such contents, as this.
Let the Q be fragrance, let it be toothache, or let it be a more complex
kind of feeling, like that of the full-moon swimming in her blue abyss,
it must first come in that simple shape, and be held fast in that first
intention, before any knowledge ABOUT it can be attained. The knowledge
ABOUT it is IT with a context added. Undo IT, and what is added cannot
be CONtext. [Footnote: If A enters and B exclaims, 'Didn't you see my
brother on the stairs?' we all hold that A may answer, 'I saw him,
but didn't know he was your brother'; ignorance of brotherhood not
abolishing power to see. But those who, on account of the unrelatedness
of the first facts with which we become acquainted, deny them to be
'known' to us, ought in consistency to maintain that if A did not
perceive the relationship of the man on the stairs to B, it was
impossible he should have noticed him at all.]
Let us say no more then about this objection, but enlarge our thesis,
thus: If there be in the universe a Q other than the Q in the feeling,
the latter may have acquaintance with an entity ejective to itself; an
acquaintance moreover, which, as mere acquaintance, it would be hard to
imagine susceptible either of improvement or increase, being in its way
complete; and which would oblige us (so long as we refuse not to call
acquaintance knowledge) to say not only that the feeling is cognitive,
but that all qualities of feeling, SO LONG AS THERE IS ANYTHING OUTSIDE
OF THEM WHICH THEY RESEMBLE, are feelings OF qualities of existence, and
perceptions of outward fact.
The point of this vindication of the cognitive function of the first
feeling lies, it will be noticed, in the discovery that q does exist
elsewhere than in it. In case this discovery were not made, we could
not be sure the feeling was cognitive; and in case there were nothing
outside to be discovered, we should have to call the feeling a dream.
But the feeling itself cannot make the discovery. Its own q is the only
q it grasps; and its own nature is not a particle altered by having
the self-transcendent function of cognition either added to it or taken
away. The function is accidental; synthetic, not analytic; and falls
outside and not inside its being. [Footnote: It seems odd to call so
important a function accidental, but I do not see how we can mend the
matter. Just as, if we start with the reality and ask how it may come
to be known, we can only reply by invoking a feeling which shall
RECONSTRUCT it in its own more private fashion; so, if we start with the
feeling and ask how it may come to know, we can only reply by invoking
a reality which shall RECONSTRUCT it in its own more public fashion. In
either case, however, the datum we start with remains just what it was.
One may easily get lost in verbal mysteries about the difference
between quality of feeling and feeling of quality, between receiving
and reconstructing the knowledge of a reality. But at the end we must
confess that the notion of real cognition involves an unmediated dualism
of the knower and the known. See Bowne's Metaphysics, New York, 1882,
pp. 403-412, and various passages in Lotze, e.g., Logic, Sec. 308.
['Unmediated' is a bad word to have used.--1909.]]
A feeling feels as a gun shoots. If there be nothing to be felt or
hit, they discharge themselves ins blaue hinein. If, however, something
starts up opposite them, they no longer simply shoot or feel, they hit
and know.
But with this arises a worse objection than any yet made. We the
critics look on and see a real q and a feeling of q; and because the two
resemble each other, we say the one knows the other. But what right have
we to say this until we know that the feeling of q means to stand for or
represent just that SAME other q? Suppose, instead of one q, a number
of real q's in the field. If the gun shoots and hits, we can easily
see which one of them it hits. But how can we distinguish which one the
feeling knows? It knows the one it stands for. But which one DOES
it stand for? It declares no intention in this respect. It merely
resembles; it resembles all indifferently; and resembling, per se, is
not necessarily representing or standing-for at all. Eggs resemble each
other, but do not on that account represent, stand for, or know each
other. And if you say this is because neither of them is a FEELING,
then imagine the world to consist of nothing but toothaches, which ARE
feelings, feelings resembling each other exactly,--would they know each
other the better for all that?
The case of q being a bare quality like that of toothache-pain is quite
different from that of its being a concrete individual thing. There is
practically no test for deciding whether the feeling of a bare quality
means to represent it or not. It can DO nothing to the quality beyond
resembling it, simply because an abstract quality is a thing to which
nothing can be done. Being without context or environment or principium
individuationis, a quiddity with no haecceity, a platonic idea, even
duplicate editions of such a quality (were they possible), would be
indiscernible, and no sign could be given, no result altered, whether
the feeling I meant to stand for this edition or for that, or whether it
simply resembled the quality without meaning to stand for it at all.
If now we grant a genuine pluralism of editions to the quality q, by
assigning to each a CONTEXT which shall distinguish it from its mates,
we may proceed to explain which edition of it the feeling knows, by
extending our principle of resemblance to the context too, and saying
the feeling knows the particular q whose context it most exactly
duplicates. But here again the theoretic doubt recurs: duplication and
coincidence, are they knowledge? The gun shows which q it points to and
hits, by BREAKING it. Until the feeling can show us which q it points to
and knows, by some equally flagrant token, why are we not free to deny
that it either points to or knows any one of the REAL q's at all, and to
affirm that the word 'resemblance' exhaustively describes its relation
to the reality?
Well, as a matter of fact, every actual feeling DOES show us, quite as
flagrantly as the gun, which q it points to; and practically in concrete
cases the matter is decided by an element we have hitherto left out. Let
us pass from abstractions to possible instances, and ask our obliging
deus ex machina to frame for us a richer world. Let him send me,
for example, a dream of the death of a certain man, and let him
simultaneously cause the man to die. How would our practical instinct
spontaneously decide whether this were a case of cognition of the
reality, or only a sort of marvellous coincidence of a resembling
reality with my dream? Just such puzzling cases as this are what the
'society for psychical research' is busily collecting and trying to
interpret in the most reasonable way.
If my dream were the only one of the kind I ever had in my life, if the
context of the death in the dream differed in many particulars from
the real death's context, and if my dream led me to no action about the
death, unquestionably we should all call it a strange coincidence,
and naught besides. But if the death in the dream had a long context,
agreeing point for point with every feature that attended the real
death; if I were constantly having such dreams, all equally perfect, and
if on awaking I had a habit of ACTING immediately as if they were true
and so getting 'the start' of my more tardily instructed neighbors,--we
should in all probability have to admit that I had some mysterious kind
of clairvoyant power, that my dreams in an inscrutable way meant just
those realities they figured, and that the word 'coincidence' failed
to touch the root of the matter. And whatever doubts any one preserved
would completely vanish, if it should appear that from the midst of my
dream I had the power of INTERFERING with the course of the reality, and
making the events in it turn this way or that, according as I dreamed
they should. Then at least it would be certain that my waking critics
and my dreaming self were dealing with the SAME.
And thus do men invariably decide such a question. THE FALLING OF THE
DREAM'S PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES into the real world, and the EXTENT
of the resemblance between the two worlds are the criteria they
instinctively use. [Footnote: The thoroughgoing objector might, it is
true, still return to the charge, and, granting a dream which should
completely mirror the real universe, and all the actions dreamed in
which should be instantly matched by duplicate actions in this universe,
still insist that this is nothing more than harmony, and that it is as
far as ever from being made clear whether the dream-world refers to that
other world, all of whose details it so closely copies. This objection
leads deep into metaphysics. I do not impugn its importance, and justice
obliges me to say that but for the teachings of my colleague, Dr. Josiah
Royce, I should neither have grasped its full force nor made my own
practical and psychological point of view as clear to myself as it is.
On this occasion I prefer to stick steadfastly to that point of view;
but I hope that Dr. Royce's more fundamental criticism of the function
of cognition may ere long see the light. [I referred in this note to
Royce's religious aspect of philosophy, then about to be published. This
powerful book maintained that the notion of REFERRING involved that of
an inclusive mind that shall own both the real q and the mental q, and
use the latter expressly as a representative symbol of the former.
At the time I could not refute this transcendentalist opinion. Later,
largely through the influence of Professor D. S. Miller (see his essay
'The meaning of truth and error,' in the Philosophical Review for 1893,
vol. 2 p. 403) I came to see that any definitely experienceable workings
would serve as intermediaries quite as well as the absolute mind's
intentions would.]] All feeling is for the sake of action, all feeling
results in action,--to-day no argument is needed to prove these truths.
But by a most singular disposition of nature which we may conceive
to have been different, MY FEELINGS ACT UPON THE REALITIES WITHIN MY
CRITIC'S WORLD. Unless, then, my critic can prove that my feeling does
not 'point to' those realities which it acts upon, how can he continue
to doubt that he and I are alike cognizant of one and the same real
world? If the action is performed in one world, that must be the world
the feeling intends; if in another world, THAT is the world the feeling
has in mind. If your feeling bear no fruits in my world, I call it
utterly detached from my world; I call it a solipsism, and call its
world a dream-world. If your toothache do not prompt you to ACT as if
I had a toothache, nor even as if I had a separate existence; if you
neither say to me, 'I know now how you must suffer!' nor tell me of
a remedy, I deny that your feeling, however it may resemble mine, is
really cognizant of mine. It gives no SIGN of being cognizant, and such
a sign is absolutely necessary to my admission that it is.
Before I can think you to mean my world, you must affect my world;
before I can think you to mean much of it, you must affect much of it;
and before I can be sure you mean it AS I DO, you must affect it JUST
AS I SHOULD if I were in your place. Then I, your critic, will gladly
believe that we are thinking, not only of the same reality, but that we
are thinking it ALIKE, and thinking of much of its extent.
Without the practical effects of our neighbor's feelings on our own
world, we should never suspect the existence of our neighbor's feelings
at all, and of course should never find ourselves playing the critic as
we do in this article. The constitution of nature is very peculiar. In
the world of each of us are certain objects called human bodies, which
move about and act on all the other objects there, and the occasions of
their action are in the main what the occasions of our action would be,
were they our bodies. They use words and gestures, which, if we used
them, would have thoughts behind them,--no mere thoughts uberhaupt,
however, but strictly determinate thoughts. I think you have the notion
of fire in general, because I see you act towards this fire in my room
just as I act towards it,--poke it and present your person towards it,
and so forth. But that binds me to believe that if you feel 'fire'
at all, THIS is the fire you feel. As a matter of fact, whenever we
constitute ourselves into psychological critics, it is not by dint of
discovering which reality a feeling 'resembles' that we find out which
reality it means. We become first aware of which one it means, and then
we suppose that to be the one it resembles. We see each other looking
at the same objects, pointing to them and turning them over in various
ways, and thereupon we hope and trust that all of our several feelings
resemble the reality and each other. But this is a thing of which we
are never theoretically sure. Still, it would practically be a case of
grubelsucht, if a ruffian were assaulting and drubbing my body, to spend
much time in subtle speculation either as to whether his vision of my
body resembled mine, or as to whether the body he really MEANT to insult
were not some body in his mind's eye, altogether other from my own. The
practical point of view brushes such metaphysical cobwebs away. If what
he have in mind be not MY body, why call we it a body at all? His mind
is inferred by me as a term, to whose existence we trace the things
that happen. The inference is quite void if the term, once inferred, be
separated from its connection with the body that made me infer it,
and connected with another that is not mine at all. No matter for the
metaphysical puzzle of how our two minds, the ruffian's and mine, can
mean the same body. Men who see each other's bodies sharing the same
space, treading the same earth, splashing the same water, making the
same air resonant, and pursuing the same game and eating out of the
same dish, will never practically believe in a pluralism of solipsistic
worlds.
Where, however, the actions of one mind seem to take no effect in the
world of the other, the case is different. This is what happens in
poetry and fiction. Every one knows Ivanhoe, for example; but so long as
we stick to the story pure and simple without regard to the facts of its
production, few would hesitate to admit that there are as many different
Ivanhoes as there are different minds cognizant of the story. [Footnote:
That is, there is no REAL 'Ivanhoe,' not even the one in Sir Walter
Scott's mind as he was writing the story. That one is only the FIRST
one of the Ivanhoe-solipsisms. It is quite true we can make it the real
Ivanhoe if we like, and then say that the other Ivanhoes know it or do
not know it, according as they refer to and resemble it or no. This is
done by bringing in Sir Walter Scott himself as the author of the real
Ivanhoe, and so making a complex object of both. This object, however,
is not a story pure and simple. It has dynamic relations with the world
common to the experience of all the readers. Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe
got itself printed in volumes which we all can handle, and to any one of
which we can refer to see which of our versions be the true one, i.e.,
the original one of Scott himself. We can see the manuscript; in short
we can get back to the Ivanhoe in Scott's mind by many an avenue and
channel of this real world of our experience,--a thing we can by no
means do with either the Ivanhoe or the Rebecca, either the Templar or
the Isaac of York, of the story taken simply as such, and detached from
the conditions of its production. Everywhere, then, we have the same
test: can we pass continuously from two objects in two minds to a third
object which seems to be in BOTH minds, because each mind feels every
modification imprinted on it by the other? If so, the first two objects
named are derivatives, to say the least, from the same third object, and
may be held, if they resemble each other, to refer to one and the same
reality.] The fact that all these Ivanhoes RESEMBLE each other does
not prove the contrary. But if an alteration invented by one man in his
version were to reverberate immediately through all the other versions,
and produce changes therein, we should then easily agree that all
these thinkers were thinking the SAME Ivanhoe, and that, fiction or no
fiction, it formed a little world common to them all.
Having reached this point, we may take up our thesis and improve it
again. Still calling the reality by the name of q and letting the
critic's feeling vouch for it, we can say that any other feeling will
be held cognizant of q, provided it both resemble q, and refer to q,
as shown by its either modifying q directly, or modifying some other
reality, p or r, which the critic knows to be continuous with q. Or more
shortly, thus: THE FEELING OF q KNOWS WHATEVER REALITY IT RESEMBLES,
AND EITHER DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY OPERATES ON. If it resemble without
operating, it is a dream; if it operate without resembling, it is an
error. [Footnote: Among such errors are those cases in which our feeling
operates on a reality which it does partially resemble, and yet does not
intend: as for instance, when I take up your umbrella, meaning to take
my own. I cannot be said here either to know your umbrella, or my own,
which latter my feeling more completely resembles. I am mistaking them
both, misrepresenting their context, etc.
We have spoken in the text as if the critic were necessarily one mind,
and the feeling criticised another. But the criticised feeling and its
critic may be earlier and later feelings of the same mind, and here it
might seem that we could dispense with the notion of operating, to prove
that critic and criticised are referring to and meaning to represent
the SAME. We think we see our past feelings directly, and know what they
refer to without appeal. At the worst, we can always fix the intention
of our present feeling and MAKE it refer to the same reality to
which any one of our past feelings may have referred. So we need no
'operating' here, to make sure that the feeling and its critic mean the
same real q. Well, all the better if this is so! We have covered the
more complex and difficult case in our text, and we may let this easier
one go. The main thing at present is to stick to practical psychology,
and ignore metaphysical difficulties.
One more remark. Our formula contains, it will be observed, nothing to
correspond to the great principle of cognition laid down by Professor
Ferrier in his Institutes of Metaphysic and apparently adopted by all
the followers of Fichte, the principle, namely, that for knowledge to
be constituted there must be knowledge of the knowing mind along with
whatever else is known: not q, as we have supposed, but q PLUS MYSELF,
must be the least I can know. It is certain that the common sense
of mankind never dreams of using any such principle when it tries to
discriminate between conscious states that are knowledge and conscious
states that are not. So that Ferrier's principle, if it have any
relevancy at all, must have relevancy to the metaphysical possibility
of consciousness at large, and not to the practically recognized
constitution of cognitive consciousness. We may therefore pass it by
without further notice here.] It is to be feared that the reader may
consider this formula rather insignificant and obvious, and hardly worth
the labor of so many pages, especially when he considers that the only
cases to which it applies are percepts, and that the whole field of
symbolic or conceptual thinking seems to elude its grasp. Where the
reality is either a material thing or act, or a state of the critic's
consciousness, I may both mirror it in my mind and operate upon it--in
the latter case indirectly, of course--as soon as I perceive it. But
there are many cognitions, universally allowed to be such, which neither
mirror nor operate on their realities.
In the whole field of symbolic thought we are universally held both
to intend, to speak of, and to reach conclusions about--to know
in short--particular realities, without having in our subjective
consciousness any mind-stuff that resembles them even in a remote
degree. We are instructed about them by language which awakens no
consciousness beyond its sound; and we know WHICH realities they are by
the faintest and most fragmentary glimpse of some remote context they
may have and by no direct imagination of themselves. As minds may differ
here, let me speak in the first person. I am sure that my own current
thinking has WORDS for its almost exclusive subjective material, words
which are made intelligible by being referred to some reality that lies
beyond the horizon of direct consciousness, and of which I am only aware
as of a terminal MORE existing in a certain direction, to which the
words might lead but do not lead yet. The SUBJECT, or TOPIC, of the
words is usually something towards which I mentally seem to pitch them
in a backward way, almost as I might jerk my thumb over my shoulder to
point at something, without looking round, if I were only entirely sure
that it was there. The UPSHOT, or CONCLUSION, of the words is something
towards which I seem to incline my head forwards, as if giving assent to
its existence, tho all my mind's eye catches sight of may be some tatter
of an image connected with it, which tatter, however, if only endued
with the feeling of familiarity and reality, makes me feel that the
whole to which it belongs is rational and real, and fit to be let pass.
Here then is cognitive consciousness on a large scale, and yet what
it knows, it hardly resembles in the least degree. The formula last laid
down for our thesis must therefore be made more complete. We may
now express it thus: A PERCEPT KNOWS WHATEVER REALITY IT DIRECTLY OR
INDIRECTLY OPERATES ON AND RESEMBLES; ACONCEPTUAL FEELING, OR THOUGHT
KNOWS A REALITY, WHENEVER IT ACTUALLY OR POTENTIALLY TERMINATES IN A
PERCEPT THAT OPERATES ON, OR RESEMBLES THAT REALITY, OR IS OTHERWISE
CONNECTED WITH IT OR WITH ITS CONTEXT. The latter percept may be either
sensation or sensorial idea; and when I say the thought must TERMINATE
in such a percept, I mean that it must ultimately be capable of leading
up thereto,--by the way of practical [missing section] is an incomplete
'thought about' that reality, that reality is its 'topic,' etc.
experience, if the terminal feeling be a sensation; by the way of
logical or habitual suggestion, if it be only an image in the mind.
Let an illustration make this plainer. I open the first book I take up,
and read the first sentence that meets my eye: 'Newton saw the handiwork
of God in the heavens as plainly as Paley in the animal kingdom.' I
immediately look back and try to analyze the subjective state in which I
rapidly apprehended this sentence as I read it. In the first place there
was an obvious feeling that the sentence was intelligible and rational
and related to the world of realities. There was also a sense of
agreement or harmony between 'Newton,' 'Paley,' and 'God.' There was no
apparent image connected with the words 'heavens,' or 'handiwork,' or
'God'; they were words merely. With 'animal kingdom' I think there was
the faintest consciousness (it may possibly have been an image of the
steps) of the Museum of Zoology in the town of Cambridge where I write.
With 'Paley' there was an equally faint consciousness of a small
dark leather book; and with 'Newton' a pretty distinct vision of the
right-hand lower corner of curling periwig. This is all the mind-stuff I
can discover in my first consciousness of the meaning of this sentence,
and I am afraid that even not all of this would have been present had I
come upon the sentence in a genuine reading of the book, and not picked
it out for an experiment. And yet my consciousness was truly cognitive.
The sentence is 'about realities' which my psychological critic--for we
must not forget him--acknowledges to be such, even as he acknowledges
my distinct feeling that they ARE realities, and my acquiescence in the
general rightness of what I read of them, to be true knowledge on my
part.
Now what justifies my critic in being as lenient as this? This
singularly inadequate consciousness of mine, made up of symbols that
neither resemble nor affect the realities they stand for,--how can he be
sure it is cognizant of the very realities he has himself in mind?
He is sure because in countless like cases he has seen such inadequate
and symbolic thoughts, by developing themselves, terminate in percepts
that practically modified and presumably resembled his own. By
'developing' themselves is meant obeying their tendencies, following up
the suggestions nascently present in them, working in the direction in
which they seem to point, clearing up the penumbra, making distinct the
halo, unravelling the fringe, which is part of their composition, and in
the midst of which their more substantive kernel of subjective content
seems consciously to lie. Thus I may develop my thought in the Paley
direction by procuring the brown leather volume and bringing the
passages about the animal kingdom before the critic's eyes. I may
satisfy him that the words mean for me just what they mean for him,
by showing him IN CONCRETO the very animals and their arrangements, of
which the pages treat. I may get Newton's works and portraits; or if
I follow the line of suggestion of the wig, I may smother my critic in
seventeenth-century matters pertaining to Newton's environment, to show
that the word 'Newton' has the same LOCUS and relations in both our
minds. Finally I may, by act and word, persuade him that what I mean by
God and the heavens and the analogy of the handiworks, is just what he
means also.
My demonstration in the last resort is to his SENSES. My thought makes
me act on his senses much as he might himself act on them, were he
pursuing the consequences of a perception of his own. Practically
then MY thought terminates in HIS realities. He willingly supposes it,
therefore, to be OF them, and inwardly to RESEMBLE what his own thought
would be, were it of the same symbolic sort as mine. And the pivot and
fulcrum and support of his mental persuasion, is the sensible operation
which my thought leads me, or may lead, to effect--the bringing of
Paley's book, of Newton's portrait, etc., before his very eyes.
In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about
and talk about the same world, because WE BELIEVE OUR PERCEPTS ARE
POSSESSED BY US IN COMMON. And we believe this because the percepts
of each one of us seem to be changed in consequence of changes in the
percepts of someone else. What I am for you is in the first instance a
percept of your own. Unexpectedly, however, I open and show you a book,
uttering certain sounds the while. These acts are also your percepts,
but they so resemble acts of yours with feelings prompting them, that
you cannot doubt I have the feelings too, or that the book is one
book felt in both our worlds. That it is felt in the same way, that my
feelings of it resemble yours, is something of which we never can be
sure, but which we assume as the simplest hypothesis that meets
the case. As a matter of fact, we never ARE sure of it, and, as
ERKENNTNISSTHEORETIKER, we can only say that of feelings that should NOT
resemble each other, both could not know the same thing at the same
time in the same way. [Footnote: Though both might terminate in the same
thing and be incomplete thoughts 'about' it.] If each holds to its own
percept as the reality, it is bound to say of the other percept, that,
though it may INTEND that reality, and prove this by working change upon
it, yet, if it do not resemble it, it is all false and wrong. [Footnote:
The difference between Idealism and Realism is immaterial here. What
is said in the text is consistent with either theory. A law by which my
percept shall change yours directly is no more mysterious than a law
by which it shall first change a physical reality, and then the reality
change yours. In either case you and I seem knit into a continuous
world, and not to form a pair of solipsisms.]
If this be so of percepts, how much more so of higher modes of thought!
Even in the sphere of sensation individuals are probably different
enough. Comparative study of the simplest conceptual elements seems to
show a wider divergence still. And when it comes to general theories
and emotional attitudes towards life, it is indeed time to say with
Thackeray, 'My friend, two different universes walk about under your hat
and under mine.'
What can save us at all and prevent us from flying asunder into a chaos
of mutually repellent solipsisms? Through what can our several minds
commune? Through nothing but the mutual resemblance of those of our
perceptual feelings which have this power of modifying one another,
WHICH ARE MERE DUMB KNOWLEDGES-OF-ACQUAINTANCE, and which must also
resemble their realities or not know them aright at all. In such pieces
of knowledge-of-acquaintance all our knowledge-about must end, and
carry a sense of this possible termination as part of its content.
These percepts, these termini, these sensible things, these mere
matters-of-acquaintance, are the only realities we ever directly know,
and the whole history of our thought is the history of our substitution
of one of them for another, and the reduction of the substitute to the
status of a conceptual sign. Contemned though they be by some thinkers,
these sensations are the mother-earth, the anchorage, the stable rock,
the first and last limits, the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem
of the mind. To find such sensational termini should be our aim with all
our higher thought. They end discussion; they destroy the false conceit
of knowledge; and without them we are all at sea with each other's
meaning. If two men act alike on a percept, they believe themselves to
feel alike about it; if not, they may suspect they know it in differing
ways. We can never be sure we understand each other till we are able to
bring the matter to this test. [Footnote: 'There is no distinction of
meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of
practice.... It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the [highest]
grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects,
which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object
of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the
whole of our conception of the object.' Charles S. Peirce: 'How to make
our Ideas clear,' in Popular Science Monthly, New York, January, 1878,
p. 293.] This is why metaphysical discussions are so much like fighting
with the air; they have no practical issue of a sensational kind.
'Scientific' theories, on the other hand, always terminate in definite
percepts. You can deduce a possible sensation from your theory and,
taking me into your laboratory, prove that your theory is true of my
world by giving me the sensation then and there. Beautiful is the
flight of conceptual reason through the upper air of truth. No wonder
philosophers are dazzled by it still, and no wonder they look with some
disdain at the low earth of feeling from which the goddess launched
herself aloft. But woe to her if she return not home to its
acquaintance; Nirgends haften dann die unsicheren Sohlen--every crazy
wind will take her, and, like a fire-balloon at night, she will go out
among the stars.
NOTE.--The reader will easily see how much of the account of the
truth-function developed later in Pragmatism was already explicit in
this earlier article, and how much came to be defined later. In this
earlier article we find distinctly asserted:--