Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/529

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No. 5.]
THE PROBLEM OF EPISTEMOLOGY.
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undermine it or to explain it away. In fact, as we saw at the outset of this paper, the distinction may be said to be involved in the very nature or notion of knowledge. Knowledge means nothing if it does not mean the relation of two factors, knowledge of an object by a subject. But knowledge is not an entity stretching across, as it were, from subject to object, and uniting them; still less is knowledge the one reality of which subject and object are two sides or aspects. Knowledge is an activity, an activo-passive experience of the subject, whereby it becomes aware of what is not itself. The cognitive state is thus related psychologically to the subject whose state it is, and epistemologically to the object of which it is the knowledge. Epistemologically there is a union of subject and object: the knower and what he knows are in a sense, as Aristotle says, one. But ontologically, or as a matter of existence, they remain distinct—the one here and the other there—and nothing avails to bridge this chasm. The chasm, it is true, is not an absolute one, otherwise knowledge would be forever impossible. Across the inane there is no bridge. Both subject and object are members of one world. That may be taken as the ultimate and unavoidable presupposition. But separation and difference are the very conditions of knowledge; if it were not for the difference where would be the need of knowledge? Each thing would actually be everything else, or rather "each" would be an impossible conception. The ὁμοῦ πάντα of Anaxagoras would be realized in a more intimate and literal sense than its author ever imagined; all things would be together, an indistinguishable conglomerate of mutual interpenetration. It is individuation, distinctness in existence, that calls for knowledge and gives it scope. Feelings, images, ideas, beliefs, volitions—these are the components of consciousness, they have an existence of their own, but it is a mode of existence generically distinct from that we attribute to things as real beings, whether material or spiritual. By means of certain of these conscious facts—those called cognitive—the being in whom they occur believes that he is made aware of the existence, nature, and actions of existences other than himself.