What kind of knowledge is it that we acquire by description? Knowledge about things with which we are not first acquainted. The most important knowledge that we possess or acquire is knowledge of objects which we know only by the knowledge we have about them--objects that we know about without knowing them. They are not direct impressions on our senses, {83} nor are they ideas known in actual experience. We make judgments about them, and the subjects about which we make these judgments are really composed of these judgments that we make about them. To go back to our illustrations, we may know a great deal about the evil eye, a malignant influence, disease, faith, healing, causality, physical objects, without any acquaintance with them, without even knowing that they exist. Such knowledge is descriptive, and the objects are descriptions. Knowledge by description is never quite simple, and is often very complex, for, besides the relation of the mental act to the object known, there are the terms and relations which are the elements in the judgment and the relations of the judgments themselves. If we analyse a judgment, every word in which it is expressed, whether it is a noun or a verb or a preposition or a conjunction, conveys a distinct meaning, indicates a term or a relation, each of which can be made a distinct object to the mind, and all of which are combined in the single meaning the judgment expresses. It is in this complexity that the possibility of error lies, and the possibility increases as the complexity increases. All the terms and the relations which a judgment contains depend on the knowledge we have by acquaintance--that is to say, we are ultimately dependent on our actual experience for all knowledge whatever, whether it is acquaintance or description, for we can only describe in terms with which we are acquainted; but in the judgment these elements are combined into new objects, or a certain relation is declared to exist between objects, and it is this combination of the elements of the judgment that involves its truth or falsehood.