Dewey is alert to the dangers which result from subjectivism, but does not distinguish, as carefully as he might, between knowledge as inference, and knowledge as perceptual awareness. Thus, while it might be granted that the subjective mind is a vicious abstraction, it does not follow that Dewey's particular interpretation of the function of inference is correct. And, although the "unwinking, unremitting eye" of the subjective knower might make experience merely a mental affair, there is no reason to believe that the operation of inference in perception would lead to the same result, for inference and awareness are quite distinct, in historical meaning and function. It is, in fact, a mere accident that inference and awareness (in the subjective sense) should both be called knowledge. In opposition to presentative realism, Dewey offers his 'naturalistic' interpretation of knowledge.[253] He finds that the function of inference, "although embodying the logical relation, is itself a natural and specifically detectable process among natural things--it is not a non-natural or epistemological relation, that is, a relation to a mind or knower not in the natural series...."[254] As has been observed, Dewey is safe in maintaining that inference is _not_ an operation performed by a subjective knower, but it does not follow from this that his interpretation of inference is correct. In fact, a discussion of inference is irrelevant to the matters which Dewey is here considering. In the second part of the essay, the discussion passes into a keen and rather clever recital of the difficulties that result from taking the knowledge relation to be 'ubiquitous.'[255] Since this relation is a constant factor in experience, it would seem as if it might be eliminated from philosophical calculations. The realist would be glad to eliminate it, but the idealist is not so willing; for, "since the point at issue is precisely the statement of the most universally defining trait of existence as existence, the invitation deliberately to disregard the most universal trait is nothing more or less than an invitation to philosophic suicide."[256] It is, Dewey says, as if two philosophers should set out to ascertain the relation which holds between an organism as 'eater' and the environment as 'food,' and one should find the essential thing to be the food, the other the eating. The 'foodists' would represent the realists, the 'eaterists' the idealists. No advance, he believes, can be made on this basis.