'significance' depart from the situation? And when our knowledge about
things has reached its never so complicated perfection, must there
not needs abide alongside of it and inextricably mixed in with it some
acquaintance with WHAT things all this knowledge is about?
Now, our supposed little feeling gives a WHAT; and if other feelings
should succeed which remember the first, its WHAT may stand as subject
or predicate of some piece of knowledge-about, of some judgment,
perceiving relations between it and other WHATS which the other feelings
may know. The hitherto dumb Q will then receive a name and be no
longer speechless. But every name, as students of logic know, has its
'denotation'; and the denotation always means some reality or content,
relationless as extra or with its internal relations unanalyzed,
like the Q which our primitive sensation is supposed to know. No
relation-expressing proposition is possible except on the basis of a
preliminary acquaintance with such 'facts,' with such contents, as this.
Let the Q be fragrance, let it be toothache, or let it be a more complex
kind of feeling, like that of the full-moon swimming in her blue abyss,
it must first come in that simple shape, and be held fast in that first
intention, before any knowledge ABOUT it can be attained. The knowledge
ABOUT it is IT with a context added. Undo IT, and what is added cannot
be CONtext. [Footnote: If A enters and B exclaims, 'Didn't you see my
brother on the stairs?' we all hold that A may answer, 'I saw him,
but didn't know he was your brother'; ignorance of brotherhood not
abolishing power to see. But those who, on account of the unrelatedness
of the first facts with which we become acquainted, deny them to be
'known' to us, ought in consistency to maintain that if A did not
perceive the relationship of the man on the stairs to B, it was
impossible he should have noticed him at all.]
Let us say no more then about this objection, but enlarge our thesis,
thus: If there be in the universe a Q other than the Q in the feeling,
the latter may have acquaintance with an entity ejective to itself; an
acquaintance moreover, which, as mere acquaintance, it would be hard to
imagine susceptible either of improvement or increase, being in its way
complete; and which would oblige us (so long as we refuse not to call
acquaintance knowledge) to say not only that the feeling is cognitive,
but that all qualities of feeling, SO LONG AS THERE IS ANYTHING OUTSIDE
OF THEM WHICH THEY RESEMBLE, are feelings OF qualities of existence, and
perceptions of outward fact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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