Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/492

II. THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE. 1 BY J. H. MUIBHEAD. I PROPOSE to discuss three questions in this paper, the first two very shortly, the third at greater length : First, under what form ought we to conceive of the goal or ideal of knowledge? secondly, how does this ideal operate in actual experience ? and thirdly, what is its relation to ultimate reality ? I. What in general outline is the nature of the ideal which we set before ourselves in knowledge ? In attempting an answer to this question I may perhaps be allowed to refer to the contents of the paper I read before this Society last year, which was published in MIND for October, 1896. I there tried to show that the beginnings of knowledge must be looked for in a concept or form of apprehension which, like the undifferentiated continuum of the psychologist, may be said to contain in itself the possibility of all differences, but to hold them as yet in solution, awaiting the distinguish- ing, crystallising action of the logical judgment to give them at once a separate place and coherent connexion in the whole. Following this suggestion, we may describe the end of know- ledge as a concept or mode of apprehending the world in which, as in the developed organism, the processes of differ- entiation and integration have been brought to completion in a fully articulated system of coherent judgments. This, if you like, is a metaphor, but it points to the two most important characteristics which logic must recognise as belonging to fully developed knowledge all-inclusiveness and self-consistency. We seek in the first place to know all that is to be known about a thing or about the world. 1 Bead before the Aristotelian Society, 14th June.