Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/307

NEW SERIES. No. 59.] QULY, 1906. MIND A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY I. THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. BY JOHN DEWEY. IT should be possible to discern and describe a knowledge as one identifies any object, concern or event. It must have its own marks ; it must offer characteristic features as much so as a thunder-storm, the constitution of a State, or a leopard. In the search for this affair, we are first of all desirous for something which is for itself, contemporaneously with its occurrence, a cognition, not something called know- ledge by another and from without whether this other be logician, psychologist or epistemologist. The ' knowledge ' may turn out false, and hence no knowledge ; but this is an after-affair ; it may prove to be rich in fruitage of wisdom, but if this outcome be only wisdom after the event, it does not concern us. What we want is just something which takes itself as knowledge, rightly or wrongly. I. This means a specific case, a sample. Yet instances are proverbially dangerous so naively and graciously may they beg the questions at issue. Our recourse is to an example so simple, so much on its face as to be as innocent as may be of assumptions. This we shall gradually complicate, mindful at each step to state just what new elements are introduced. Let us suppose a smell, just a floating odour. This odour may be anchored by supposing that it moves to action ; it 20