There remains for consideration the place of the cognitive relation in Spencer's philosophy of science. We need not here discuss his transfigured realism. Apart from the customary references to the Unknowable, of which what is knowable is said to be symbolic, it comes to little more than laying special emphasis on the truism that what is known in the so-called objective world involves the process of knowing; from which it follows that, apart from knowing it the objective world cannot be known. From this Spencer draws the conclusion that terms in cognitive relatedness have their very nature determined in and through that relatedness, and cannot _in themselves_ be what they are, and as they are, in the field of cognitive symbolism. This may or may not be true. I am one of those who question the validity of the arguments in favour of this conclusion. Since, however, the philosophy of science deals only with the knowable--of which the so-called appearances with which we have direct acquaintance are the primary data--we need not here trouble ourselves with the controversy between realists and symbolists. Even on Spencer's view the world as symbolized is the real world _for science_. Now one way of expressing the fact that the cognitive relation is always present where knowledge is concerned is to proclaim 'the truth that our states of consciousness are the only things we can know'.[64] But it is a terribly ambiguous way of expressing the fact. What is here meant by a state of consciousness? So far as cognition is concerned it is, or at any rate it involves, a relationship between something known and the organism, as knowing--for Spencer assuredly the organism, though a so-called inner aspect therein. Of course it is a very complex relationship. It comprises relations in what is known, and relations in the organism as knowing. Hence Spencer defines life, psychical as well as physical, as 'the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations'.[65] 'That which distinguishes Psychology is that each of its propositions takes account both of the connected internal phenomena and of the connected external phenomena to which they refer. It is not only the one, nor only the other, that characterises cognition. It is the connexion between these two connexions.'[66]