it is said, does not exist--it subsists. This thesis, it will easily be understood, is based on an analysis, and deals with arguments that touch the most fundamental problems of theory of knowledge. Moreover, its presentment is excessively technical, and only those highly trained in the habit of psychological introspection and skilled in philosophical analysis are really competent to discuss it. It is not possible to offer here anything but a simple outline of the part of the theory that concerns the present problem. The actual experience of knowing is a relation between two things, one of which is a mental _act_, the act of perceiving or thinking or having ideas, and the other is an _object_, that which is perceived or thought of. The act is a particular mental existence, it is the act of a psychical individual. The object is not included within the actual experience which is the knowing of it, it is {86} that which is meant or intended by the experience. The act, then, is the mental process of meaning or intending, the object the thing meant or intended. The mental act differs according to the kind of object intended. The act of perceiving is the direction of the mind towards sense data and ideas; the act of judging is the direction of the mind towards judgments or propositions about things, propositions that affirm or deny relations between things; the act of supposing is different from both these--it is the direction of the mind towards suppositions. Suppositions differ from ideas in this, that they may be either positive or negative, whereas ideas are never negative. This may seem to contradict experience. Can we not, for example, have an idea of not-red just as well as an idea of red? No, the two ideas can easily be seen to be one and the same; in each case it is red we are actually acquainted with, and the difference is in affirming or denying existence to the one idea. The difference is in our judgment, which may be affirmative or negative. A supposition is like a judgment in this respect; it may be either affirmative or negative, but it differs from a judgment in another respect, that while a judgment always conveys a conviction, always expresses belief or disbelief, a supposition does not--it is neither believed nor disbelieved.