"Immediate empiricism," he says, "postulates that things--anything, everything, in the ordinary or non-technical use of the term 'thing'--are what they are experienced as. Hence, if one wishes to describe anything truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as being."[212] The idealists, on the contrary, hold "that things (or, ultimately, Reality, Being) _are_ only and just what they are _known_ to be or that things are, or Reality _is_, what it is for a conscious knower--whether the knower be conceived primarily as a perceiver or as a thinker being a further, and secondary, question. This is the root-paralogism of all idealisms, whether subjective or objective, psychological or epistemological."[213] Knowing is merely one mode of experiencing, and things may be experienced in other ways, as, for instance, aesthetically, morally, technologically, or economically. This follows Dewey's familiar division of the processes of experience into separate 'functions' or activities. It becomes the duty of the philosopher, following this scheme, to find out "_what_ sort of an experience knowing is--or, concretely how things are experienced when they are experienced _as_ known things."[214] Dewey fails, in this essay, to draw a distinction which is highly important, between knowledge as awareness and knowledge as reflection. This results in some confusion. For the present, he is concerned with knowledge as awareness. He employs an illustration to make his meaning clear; the experience of fright at a noise, which turns out, when examined and known, to be the tapping of a window shade. What is originally experienced is a frightful noise. If, after examination, the 'frightfulness' is classified as 'psychical,' while the 'real' fact is said to be harmless, there is no warrant for reading this distinction back into the original experience. The argument is directed against that mode of explaining the difference between the psychical and the physical which employs a subjective mind or 'knower' as the container of the merely subjective aspects of reality. Dewey would hold that mind, used in this sense, is a fiction, having a small explanatory value, and creating more problems than it solves. The difference between psychical and physical is relative, not absolute. The frightful noise first heard was neither psychical nor physical; it was what it was experienced as, and the experience contained no such distinction, nor did it contain a 'knower.' The noise _as known_, after the intervention of an act of judgment, contained these elements (except the 'knower'), but the thing is not merely what it is known as. There is no warrant for reading the distinctions made by judgment back into a situation where judgment was not operative. The original fact was precisely what it was experienced as.