"We are following the plainest dictates of consciousness, we avoid a thousand difficulties, and we get a solid ground on which to rest and to build, when we maintain that the mind in its first exercises acquires knowledge; not, indeed, scientific or arranged, not of qualities of objects and classes of objects, but still knowledge--the knowledge of things presenting themselves, and as they present themselves; which knowledge, individual and concrete, is the foundation of all other knowledge, abstract, general and deductive. In particular, the mind is so constituted as to attain a knowledge of body or of material objects. It may be difficult to ascertain the exact point or surface at which the mind and body come together and influence each other, in particular, how far into the body (Descartes without proof thought to be in the pineal gland), but it is certain that when they do meet mind knows body as having its essential properties of extension and resisting energy. It is through the bodily organism that the intelligence of man attains its knowledge of all material objects beyond. This is true of the infant mind; it is true also of the mature mind. We may assert something more than this regarding the organism. It is not only the medium through which we know all bodily objects beyond itself; it is itself an object primarily known; nay, I am inclined to think that, along with the objects immediately affecting it, it is the only object originally known. Intuitively man seems to know nothing beyond his own organism, and objects directly affecting it; in all further knowledge there is a process of inference proceeding on a gathered experience. This theory seems to me to explain all the facts, and it delivers us from many perplexities."[67] [67] N. Y., 1889, pp. 62-63. "In our primitive cognition of body there is involved a knowledge of Outness or Externality. We know the object perceived, be it the organism or the object affecting the organism, as not in the mind, but as out of the mind. In regard to some of the objects perceived by us, we may be in doubt as to whether they are in the organism or beyond it, but we are always sure that they are extra-mental."[68] [68] Pp. 68-69. "We know the Objects as Affecting Us. I have already said that we know them as independent of us. This is an important truth. But it is equally true and equally important that these objects are made known to us as somehow having an influence on us. The organic object is capable of affecting our minds, and the extra-organic object affects the organism which affects the mind. Upon this cognition are founded certain judgments as to the relations of the objects known to the knowing mind."[69] [69] P. 70.