If the central humanistic thesis, printed above in italics, be accepted,
it will follow that, if there be any such thing at all as knowing, the
knower and the object known must both be portions of experience. One
part of experience must, therefore, either
(1) Know another part of experience--in other words, parts must, as
Professor Woodbridge says, [Footnote: In Science, November 4, 1904, p.
599.] represent ONE ANOTHER instead of representing realities outside of
'consciousness'--this case is that of conceptual knowledge; or else
(2) They must simply exist as so many ultimate THATS or facts of being,
in the first instance; and then, as a secondary complication, and
without doubling up its entitative singleness, any one and the same
THAT in experience must figure alternately as a thing known and as a
knowledge of the thing, by reason of two divergent kinds of context into
which, in the general course of experience, it gets woven. [Footnote:
This statement is probably excessively obscure to any one who has not
read my two articles 'Does Consciousness Exist?' and 'A World of Pure
Experience' in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. i, 1904.]
This second case is that of sense-perception. There is a stage of
thought that goes beyond common sense, and of it I shall say more
presently; but the common-sense stage is a perfectly definite
halting-place of thought, primarily for purposes of action; and, so long
as we remain on the common-sense stage of thought, object and subject
FUSE in the fact of 'presentation' or sense-perception-the pen and hand
which I now SEE writing, for example, ARE the physical realities which
those words designate. In this case there is no self-transcendency
implied in the knowing. Humanism, here, is only a more comminuted
IDENTITATSPHILOSOPHIE.
In case (1), on the contrary, the representative experience DOES
TRANSCEND ITSELF in knowing the other experience that is its object.
No one can talk of the knowledge of the one by the other without seeing
them as numerically distinct entities, of which the one lies beyond the
other and away from it, along some direction and with some interval,
that can be definitely named. But, if the talker be a humanist, he
must also see this distance-interval concretely and pragmatically, and
confess it to consist of other intervening experiences--of possible
ones, at all events, if not of actual. To call my present idea of my
dog, for example, cognitive of the real dog means that, as the actual
tissue of experience is constituted, the idea is capable of leading into
a chain of other experiences on my part that go from next to next and
terminate at last in vivid sense-perceptions of a jumping, barking,
hairy body. Those ARE the real dog, the dog's full presence, for my
common sense. If the supposed talker is a profound philosopher, altho
they may not BE the real dog for him, they MEAN the real dog, are
practical substitutes for the real dog, as the representation was a
practical substitute for them, that real dog being a lot of atoms,
say, or of mind-stuff, that lie WHERE the sense-perceptions lie in his
experience as well as in my own.