'Our knowledge,' writes Grote, 'may be contemplated in either of two
ways, or, to use other words, we may speak in a double manner of the
"object" of knowledge. That is, we may either use language thus: we
KNOW a thing, a man, etc.; or we may use it thus: we know such and such
things ABOUT the thing, the man, etc. Language in general, following its
true logical instinct, distinguishes between these two applications
of the notion of knowledge, the one being yvwvai, noscere, kennen,
connaitre, the other being eidevai, scire, wissen, savoir. In
the origin, the former may be considered more what I have called
phenomenal--it is the notion of knowledge as ACQUAINTANCE or familiarity
with what is known; which notion is perhaps more akin to the phenomenal
bodily communication, and is less purely intellectual than the other; it
is the kind of knowledge which we have of a thing by the presentation
to the senses or the representation of it in picture or type, a
Vorstellung. The other, which is what we express in judgments or
propositions, what is embodied in Begriffe or concepts without any
necessary imaginative representation, is in its origin the more
intellectual notion of knowledge. There is no reason, however, why we
should not express our knowledge, whatever its kind, in either manner,
provided only we do not confusedly express it, in the same proposition
or piece of reasoning, in both.'
Now obviously if our supposed feeling of Q is (if knowledge at all) only
knowledge of the mere acquaintance-type, it is milking a he-goat, as
the ancients would have said, to try to extract from it any deliverance
ABOUT anything under the sun, even about itself. And it is as unjust,
after our failure, to turn upon it and call it a psychical nothing, as
it would be, after our fruitless attack upon the billy-goat, to proclaim
the non-lactiferous character of the whole goat-tribe. But the entire
industry of the Hegelian school in trying to shove simple sensation out
of the pale of philosophic recognition is founded on this false issue.
It is always the 'speechlessness' of sensation, its inability to make
any 'statement,'[Footnote: See, for example, Green's Introduction to
Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, p. 36.] that is held to make the very
notion of it meaningless, and to justify the student of knowledge in
scouting it out of existence. 'Significance,' in the sense of standing
as the sign of other mental states, is taken to be the sole function
of what mental states we have; and from the perception that our little
primitive sensation has as yet no significance in this literal sense,
it is an easy step to call it first meaningless, next senseless, then
vacuous, and finally to brand it as absurd and inadmissible. But in
this universal liquidation, this everlasting slip, slip, slip, of direct
acquaintance into knowledge-ABOUT, until at last nothing is left
about which the knowledge can be supposed to obtain, does not all
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