Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/309

THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE, i 295 jf of relative knowledge, just marking the gap between our type of consciousness and some other with which we may contrast it after the manner of the agnostic or the transcen- dentalist (who hold so much property in joint ownership !), but holds because knowing is knowing, that way of bringing things to bear upon things which we call reflexion a mani- pulation of experiences in the light one of another. " Feeling," I read in a recent article, " feeling is immedi- ately acquainted with its own quality, with its own subjec- tive being." 1 How and whence this duplication in the inwards of feeling into feeling the knower and feeling the known ? into feeling as being and feeling as acquaintance ? Let us frankly deny such monsters. Feeling is its own quality ; is its own specific (whence and why, once more, sub- jective ?} being. If this be dogmatism, it is at least worth insistent declaration, were it only by way of counter-irritant to that other dogmatism which asserts that being in con- sciousness is always presence for or in knowledge. So let us repeat once more, that to be a smell (or anything else) is one thing, to be known as smell, another ; to be a ' feeling ' one thing, to be known as a ' feeling ' another. 2 The first is thinghood ; being, absolute, indubitable, direct ; in this way all things are that are in consciousness at all. 3 The second is reflected being, things indicating and calling for other things something offering the possibility of truth and hence of falsity. The first is genuine immediacy ; the second is (in the instance discussed) a pseudo-immediacy, which in the same breath that it proclaims its immediacy smuggles in another term (and one which is unexperienced both in itself 1 1 must remind the reader again of a point already suggested. It is the identification of presence in consciousness with knowledge as such that leads to setting up a mind (ego, subject) which has the peculiar property of knowing (only so often it knows wrong !), or else that leads to supplying ' sensations ' with the peculiar property of surveying their own entrails. Given the correct feeling that knowledge involves relation- ship, there being, by supposition, no other thing to which the thing in consciousness is related, it is forthwith related to a soul substance, or to its ghostly offspring, a 'subject,' or to 'consciousness' itself. 2 Let us further recall that this theory requires either that things present shall be already psychical things (feelings, sensations, etc.), in order to be assimilated to the knowing mind, subject to consciousness ; or else translates genuinely naive realism into the miracle of a mind which gets outside itself to lay its ghostly hands upon the things of an external world. 3 This means that things may be present as known, just as they be present as hard or soft, agreeable or disgusting, hoped for or dreaded. The Mediacy, or the art of intervention, which characterises knowledge, indicates precisely the way in which known things as known are present.