For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean by my image, and I can
tell you nothing; or if I fail to point or lead you towards the Harvard
Delta; or if, being led by you, I am uncertain whether the Hall I see be
what I had in mind or not; you would rightly deny that I had 'meant'
that particular hall at all, even though my mental image might to some
degree have resembled it. The resemblance would count in that case as
coincidental merely, for all sorts of things of a kind resemble one
another in this world without being held for that reason to take
cognizance of one another.
On the other hand, if I can lead you to the hall, and tell you of its
history and present uses; if in its presence I feel my idea, however
imperfect it may have been, to have led hither and to be now
_terminated;_ if the associates of the image and of the felt hall run
parallel, so that each term of the one context corresponds serially, as
I walk, with an answering term of the others; why then my soul was
prophetic, and my idea must be, and by common consent would be, called
cognizant of reality. That percept was what I _meant_, for into it my
idea has passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness and fulfilled
intention. Nowhere is there jar, but every later moment continues and
corroborates an earlier one.
In this continuing and corroborating, taken in no transcendental sense,
but denoting definitely felt transitions, _lies all that the knowing of
a percept by an idea can possibly contain or signify_. Wherever such
transitions are felt, the first experience _knows_ the last one. Where
they do not, or where even as possibles they can not, intervene, there
can be no pretence of knowing. In this latter case the extremes will be
connected, if connected at all, by inferior relations--bare likeness or
succession, or by 'withness' alone. Knowledge of sensible realities thus
comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is _made_; and made by
relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain
intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop towards their
terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction
followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that
_their starting-point thereby becomes a knower and their terminus an
object meant or known_. That is all that knowing (in the simple case
considered) can be known-as, that is the whole of its nature, put into
experiential terms. Whenever such is the sequence of our experiences we
may freely say that we had the terminal object 'in mind' from the
outset, even although _at_ the outset nothing was there in us but a flat
piece of substantive experience like any other, with no
self-transcendency about it, and no mystery save the mystery of coming
into existence and of being gradually followed by other pieces of
substantive experience, with conjunctively transitional experiences
between. That is what we _mean_ here by the object's being 'in mind.' Of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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