It seems clear, therefore, that, of our two statements, the one which comes nearest to expressing the fact of which we are immediately certain is “I see a triangle”, because the other makes inferences to something public, and thus goes beyond the bare datum. This is on the assumption that we should not say “there is a black dot” when we see a black dot which we attribute to eye-trouble and therefore suppose that no one else can see. Let us therefore concentrate upon “I see a triangle”, and ask ourselves whether the whole of this, or only part, can be accepted as a primitive certainty. A moment’s reflection shows that both “I” and “see” are words which take us beyond what the momentary event reveals. Take “I” to begin with. This is a word whose meaning evidently depends upon memory and expectation. “I” means the person who had certain remembered experiences and is expected to have certain future experiences. We might say “I see a triangle now and I saw a square a moment ago.” The word “I” has exactly the same meaning in its two occurrences in this sentence, and therefore evidently has a meaning dependent upon memory. Now it is our object to arrive at the contribution to your knowledge which is made by seeing the triangle at the moment. Therefore, since the word “I” takes you beyond this contribution, we must cut it out if we want to find a correct verbal expression for what is added to our knowledge by seeing the triangle. We will say “a triangle is being seen”. This is at any rate one step nearer to what we are seeking. But now we must deal with the word “seen”. As ordinarily used, this is a causal word, suggesting something dependent upon the eyes. In this sense, it obviously involves a mass of previous experience; a new-born baby does not know that what it sees depends upon its eyes. However, we could eliminate this. Obviously all objects of sight have a common quality, which no objects of touch or hearing have; a visual object is different from an auditory object, and so on. Therefore instead of saying “a triangle is being seen”, we should say “there is a visual triangle”. Of course the meanings of the words “visual” and “triangle” can only be learnt by experience, but they are not _logically_ dependent upon experience. A being could be imagined which would know the words at birth; such a being could express its datum in the words “there is a visual triangle”. In any case, the problems remaining belong to the study of concepts; we will therefore ignore them at present. Now in English the words “there is” are ambiguous. When I used them before, saying, “there is a triangle”, I meant them in the sense of “_voila_” or “_da ist_”. Now I mean them in the sense of “_il y a_” or “_es giebt_”. One might express what is meant by saying “a visual triangle exists”, but the word “exist” has all sorts of metaphysical connotations that I wish to avoid. Perhaps it is best to say “occurs”.