The point of this vindication of the cognitive function of the first
feeling lies, it will be noticed, in the discovery that q does exist
elsewhere than in it. In case this discovery were not made, we could
not be sure the feeling was cognitive; and in case there were nothing
outside to be discovered, we should have to call the feeling a dream.
But the feeling itself cannot make the discovery. Its own q is the only
q it grasps; and its own nature is not a particle altered by having
the self-transcendent function of cognition either added to it or taken
away. The function is accidental; synthetic, not analytic; and falls
outside and not inside its being. [Footnote: It seems odd to call so
important a function accidental, but I do not see how we can mend the
matter. Just as, if we start with the reality and ask how it may come
to be known, we can only reply by invoking a feeling which shall
RECONSTRUCT it in its own more private fashion; so, if we start with the
feeling and ask how it may come to know, we can only reply by invoking
a reality which shall RECONSTRUCT it in its own more public fashion. In
either case, however, the datum we start with remains just what it was.
One may easily get lost in verbal mysteries about the difference
between quality of feeling and feeling of quality, between receiving
and reconstructing the knowledge of a reality. But at the end we must
confess that the notion of real cognition involves an unmediated dualism
of the knower and the known. See Bowne's Metaphysics, New York, 1882,
pp. 403-412, and various passages in Lotze, e.g., Logic, Sec. 308.
['Unmediated' is a bad word to have used.--1909.]]
A feeling feels as a gun shoots. If there be nothing to be felt or
hit, they discharge themselves ins blaue hinein. If, however, something
starts up opposite them, they no longer simply shoot or feel, they hit
and know.
But with this arises a worse objection than any yet made. We the
critics look on and see a real q and a feeling of q; and because the two
resemble each other, we say the one knows the other. But what right have
we to say this until we know that the feeling of q means to stand for or
represent just that SAME other q? Suppose, instead of one q, a number
of real q's in the field. If the gun shoots and hits, we can easily
see which one of them it hits. But how can we distinguish which one the
feeling knows? It knows the one it stands for. But which one DOES
it stand for? It declares no intention in this respect. It merely
resembles; it resembles all indifferently; and resembling, per se, is
not necessarily representing or standing-for at all. Eggs resemble each
other, but do not on that account represent, stand for, or know each
other. And if you say this is because neither of them is a FEELING,
then imagine the world to consist of nothing but toothaches, which ARE
feelings, feelings resembling each other exactly,--would they know each
other the better for all that?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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