I hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge there
is no special inner mystery, but only an outer chain of physical or
mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing. TO KNOW AN OBJECT IS
HERE TO LEAD TO IT THROUGH A CONTEXT WHICH THE WORLD SUPPLIES. All this
was most instructively set forth by our colleague D. S. Miller at our
meeting in New York last Christmas, and for re-confirming my sometime
wavering opinion, I owe him this acknowledgment. [Footnote: See Dr.
Miller's articles on Truth and Error, and on Content and Function, in
the Philosophical Review, July, 1893, and Nov., 1895.]
Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive acquaintance
with an object, and let the object be the white paper before our eyes.
The thought-stuff and the thing-stuff are here indistinguishably the
same in nature, as we saw a moment since, and there is no context of
intermediaries or associates to stand between and separate the thought
and thing. There is no 'presence in absence' here, and no 'pointing,'
but rather an allround embracing of the paper by the thought; and it is
clear that the knowing cannot now be explained exactly as it was when
the tigers were its object. Dotted all through our experience are states
of immediate acquaintance just like this. Somewhere our belief always
does rest on ultimate data like the whiteness, smoothness, or squareness
of this paper. Whether such qualities be truly ultimate aspects of
being, or only provisional suppositions of ours, held-to till we get
better informed, is quite immaterial for our present inquiry. So long as
it is believed in, we see our object face to face. What now do we mean
by 'knowing' such a sort of object as this? For this is also the way
in which we should know the tiger if our conceptual idea of him were to
terminate by having led us to his lair?
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