The Meaning of Truth | Page 7

hold a
merely feeling consciousness to be no better--one would sometimes say
from their utterances, a good deal worse--than no consciousness at all.
Such phrases as these, for example, are common to-day in the mouths
of those who claim to walk in the footprints of Kant and Hegel rather
than in the ancestral English paths: 'A perception detached from all
others, "left out of the heap we call a mind," being out of all relation,
has no qualities--is simply nothing. We can no more consider it than we
can see vacancy.' 'It is simply in itself fleeting, momentary, unnameable
(because while we name it it has become another), and for the very
same reason unknowable, the very negation of knowability.' 'Exclude
from what we have considered real all qualities constituted by relation,
we find that none are left.'
Altho such citations as these from the writings of Professor Green
might be multiplied almost indefinitely, they would hardly repay the
pains of collection, so egregiously false is the doctrine they teach. Our
little supposed feeling, whatever it may be, from the cognitive point of
view, whether a bit of knowledge or a dream, is certainly no psychical
zero. It is a most positively and definitely qualified inner fact, with a
complexion all its own. Of course there are many mental facts which it
is NOT. It knows Q, if Q be a reality, with a very minimum of
knowledge. It neither dates nor locates it. It neither classes nor names it.
And it neither knows itself as a feeling, nor contrasts itself with other
feelings, nor estimates its own duration or intensity. It is, in short, if
there is no more of it than this, a most dumb and helpless and useless
kind of thing.
But if we must describe it by so many negations, and if it can say
nothing ABOUT itself or ABOUT anything else, by what right do we
deny that it is a psychical zero? And may not the 'relationists' be right
after all?
In the innocent looking word 'about' lies the solution of this riddle; and
a simple enough solution it is when frankly looked at. A quotation from

a too seldom quoted book, the Exploratio Philosophica of John Grote
(London, 1865), p. 60, will form the best introduction to it.
'Our knowledge,' writes Grote, 'may be contemplated in either of two
ways, or, to use other words, we may speak in a double manner of the
"object" of knowledge. That is, we may either use language thus: we
KNOW a thing, a man, etc.; or we may use it thus: we know such and
such things ABOUT the thing, the man, etc. Language in general,
following its true logical instinct, distinguishes between these two
applications of the notion of knowledge, the one being yvwvai, noscere,
kennen, connaitre, the other being eidevai, scire, wissen, savoir. In the
origin, the former may be considered more what I have called
phenomenal--it is the notion of knowledge as ACQUAINTANCE or
familiarity with what is known; which notion is perhaps more akin to
the phenomenal bodily communication, and is less purely intellectual
than the other; it is the kind of knowledge which we have of a thing by
the presentation to the senses or the representation of it in picture or
type, a Vorstellung. The other, which is what we express in judgments
or propositions, what is embodied in Begriffe or concepts without any
necessary imaginative representation, is in its origin the more
intellectual notion of knowledge. There is no reason, however, why we
should not express our knowledge, whatever its kind, in either manner,
provided only we do not confusedly express it, in the same proposition
or piece of reasoning, in both.'
Now obviously if our supposed feeling of Q is (if knowledge at all)
only knowledge of the mere acquaintance-type, it is milking a he- goat,
as the ancients would have said, to try to extract from it any deliverance
ABOUT anything under the sun, even about itself. And it is as unjust,
after our failure, to turn upon it and call it a psychical nothing, as it
would be, after our fruitless attack upon the billy-goat, to proclaim the
non-lactiferous character of the whole goat-tribe. But the entire
industry of the Hegelian school in trying to shove simple sensation out
of the pale of philosophic recognition is founded on this false issue. It
is always the 'speechlessness' of sensation, its inability to make any
'statement,'[Footnote: See, for example, Green's Introduction to Hume's
Treatise of Human Nature, p. 36.] that is held to make the very notion

of it meaningless, and to justify the student of knowledge in scouting it
out of existence. 'Significance,' in the sense of standing as the sign of
other mental states, is taken to be