Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/312

298 JOHN DEWEY: my knowledge of dogs and their ways. But the knowledge of the dog, qua knowledge, remains characteristically marked off from the use of that knowledge in the fulfilment ex- perience, the hunt. The hunt is a realisation of knowledge ; it alone, if you please, verifies, validates, knowledge, or supplies tests of truth. The prior knowledge of the dog, was, if you wish, hypothetical, lacking in assurance, in categorical cer- tainty. The hunting, the fulfilling, realising experience alone gives knowledge, because it alone completely assures ; makes faith good in works. Now there is and can be no objection to this definition of knowledge, provided it is consistently adhered to. One has as much right to identify knowledge with complete assurance, as I have to identify it with anything else. Considerable justification in the common use of language, in common sense, may be found for defining knowledge as complete assurance. But even upon this definition, the fulfilling ex- perience is not, as such, complete assurance, and hence not a knowledge. Assurance, cognitive validation, and guaran- teeship, follow from it, but are not coincident with its oc- currence. It gives, but is not, assurance. The concrete construction of a story, the manipulation of a machine, the hunting with the dogs, is not, so far as it is fulfilment, a confirmation of meanings previously entertained as cogni- tional ; that is, is not contemporaneously experienced as such. To think of prior schemes, symbols, meanings, as fulfilled in a subsequent experience, is reflectively to present to oneself in their relations to one another both the meanings and the experiences in which they are, as a matter of fact, embodied. This reflective attitude cannot be identical with the fulfilment experience itself. It occurs only in retrospect when the worth of the meanings, the cognitive ideas, is critically inspected in the light of their fulfilment. Or it occurs as an interruption of the fulfilling experience. The hunter stops his hunting consciousness as a fulfilment to reflect that he made a mistake in his idea of his dog, or again , that his dog is everything he thought he was that his notion of him is confirmed. Or, the man stops the actual construction of his machine and turns back upon his plan in correction or in admiring estimate of its value. The ful- filling experience is not of itself knowledge, then, even if we identify knowledge with fulness of assurance or guarantee. Moreover it gives, affords, assurance only in reference to a situation which we have not yet considered. 1 1 In other words, the situation as described is not to be confused with the case of hunting on purpose to test an idea regarding the dog.