II

THE TIGERS IN INDIA [Footnote: Extracts from a presidential address

before the American Psychological Association, published in the

Psychological Review, vol. ii, p. 105 (1895).]

THERE are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or

intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively. Altho

such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively,

most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or

the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or

symbolically.

Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual

knowledge; and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit

here. Exactly what do we MEAN by saying that we here know the tigers?

What is the precise fact that the cognition so confidently claimed is

KNOWN-AS, to use Shadworth Hodgson's inelegant but valuable form of

words?

Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is having

them, however absent in body, become in some way present to our thought;

or that our knowledge of them is known as presence of our thought to

them. A great mystery is usually made of this peculiar presence in

absence; and the scholastic philosophy, which is only common sense

grown pedantic, would explain it as a peculiar kind of existence, called

INTENTIONAL EXISTENCE of the tigers in our mind. At the very least,

people would say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally

POINTING towards them as we sit here.

But now what do we mean by POINTING, in such a case as this? What is the

pointing known-as, here?

To this question I shall have to give a very prosaic answer--one

that traverses the pre-possessions not only of common sense and

scholasticism, but also those of nearly all the epistemological writers

whom I have ever read. The answer, made brief, is this: The pointing of

our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of

mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and

that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real

context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers. It is known

as our rejection of a jaguar, if that beast were shown us as a tiger; as

our assent to a genuine tiger if so shown. It is known as our ability

to utter all sorts of propositions which don't contradict other

propositions that are true of the real tigers. It is even known, if we

take the tigers very seriously, as actions of ours which may terminate

in directly intuited tigers, as they would if we took a voyage to India

for the purpose of tiger-hunting and brought back a lot of skins of

the striped rascals which we had laid low. In all this there is no

self-transcendency in our mental images TAKEN BY THEMSELVES. They are

one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the

tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, IF YOU

ONCE GRANT A CONNECTING WORLD TO BE THERE. In short, the ideas and the

tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to use Hume's language,

as any two things can be; and pointing means here an operation as

external and adventitious as any that nature yields.[Footnote: A

stone in one field may 'fit,' we say, a hole in another field. But the

relation of 'fitting,' so long as no one carries the stone to the hole

and drops it in, is only one name for the fact that such an act MAY

happen. Similarly with the knowing of the tigers here and now. It is

only an anticipatory name for a further associative and terminative

process that MAY occur.]

I hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge there

is no special inner mystery, but only an outer chain of physical or

mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing. TO KNOW AN OBJECT IS

HERE TO LEAD TO IT THROUGH A CONTEXT WHICH THE WORLD SUPPLIES. All this

was most instructively set forth by our colleague D. S. Miller at our

meeting in New York last Christmas, and for re-confirming my sometime

wavering opinion, I owe him this acknowledgment. [Footnote: See Dr.

Miller's articles on Truth and Error, and on Content and Function, in

the Philosophical Review, July, 1893, and Nov., 1895.]

Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive acquaintance

with an object, and let the object be the white paper before our eyes.

The thought-stuff and the thing-stuff are here indistinguishably the

same in nature, as we saw a moment since, and there is no context of

intermediaries or associates to stand between and separate the thought

and thing. There is no 'presence in absence' here, and no 'pointing,'

but rather an allround embracing of the paper by the thought; and it is

clear that the knowing cannot now be explained exactly as it was when

the tigers were its object. Dotted all through our experience are states

of immediate acquaintance just like this. Somewhere our belief always

does rest on ultimate data like the whiteness, smoothness, or squareness

of this paper. Whether such qualities be truly ultimate aspects of

being, or only provisional suppositions of ours, held-to till we get

better informed, is quite immaterial for our present inquiry. So long as

it is believed in, we see our object face to face. What now do we mean

by 'knowing' such a sort of object as this? For this is also the way

in which we should know the tiger if our conceptual idea of him were to

terminate by having led us to his lair?

This address must not become too long, so I must give my answer in the

fewest words. And let me first say this: So far as the white paper or

other ultimate datum of our experience is considered to enter also into

some one else's experience, and we, in knowing it, are held to know it

there as well as here; so far, again, as it is considered to be a mere

mask for hidden molecules that other now impossible experiences of our

own might some day lay bare to view; so far it is a case of tigers in

India again--the things known being absent experiences, the knowing can

only consist in passing smoothly towards them through the intermediary

context that the world supplies. But if our own private vision of the

paper be considered in abstraction from every other event, as if it

constituted by itself the universe (and it might perfectly well do so,

for aught we can understand to the contrary), then the paper seen and

the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact which,

properly named, is THE DATUM, THE PHENOMENON, OR THE EXPERIENCE. The

paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper, because paper

and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience,

when, taken in a larger world of which it forms a part, its connections

are traced in different directions. [Footnote: What is meant by this is

that 'the experience' can be referred to either of two great associative

systems, that of the experiencer's mental history, or that of the

experienced facts of the world. Of both of these systems it forms part,

and may be regarded, indeed, as one of their points of intersection.

One might let a vertical line stand for the mental history; but the

same object, O, appears also in the mental history of different persons,

represented by the other vertical lines. It thus ceases to be the

private property of one experience, and becomes, so to speak, a shared

or public thing. We can track its outer history in this way, and

represent it by the horizontal line. (It is also known representatively

at other points of the vertical lines, or intuitively there again,

so that the line of its outer history would have to be looped and

wandering, but I make it straight for simplicity's sake.)] In any case,

however, it is the same stuff figures in all the sets of lines.

TO KNOW IMMEDIATELY, THEN, OR INTUITIVELY, IS FOR MENTAL CONTENT AND

OBJECT TO BE IDENTICAL. This is a very different definition from that

which we gave of representative knowledge; but neither definition

involves those mysterious notions of self-transcendency and presence in

absence which are such essential parts of the ideas of knowledge, both

of philosophers and of common men. [Footnote: The reader will observe

that the text is written from the point of view of NAIF realism or

common sense, and avoids raising the idealistic controversy.]