The Meaning of Truth | Page 8

the sole function of what mental
states we have; and from the perception that our little primitive
sensation has as yet no significance in this literal sense, it is an easy
step to call it first meaningless, next senseless, then vacuous, and
finally to brand it as absurd and inadmissible. But in this universal
liquidation, this everlasting slip, slip, slip, of direct acquaintance into
knowledge-ABOUT, until at last nothing is left about which the
knowledge can be supposed to obtain, does not all 'significance' depart
from the situation? And when our knowledge about things has reached
its never so complicated perfection, must there not needs abide
alongside of it and inextricably mixed in with it some acquaintance
with WHAT things all this knowledge is about?
Now, our supposed little feeling gives a WHAT; and if other feelings
should succeed which remember the first, its WHAT may stand as
subject or predicate of some piece of knowledge-about, of some
judgment, perceiving relations between it and other WHATS which the
other feelings may know. The hitherto dumb Q will then receive a
name and be no longer speechless. But every name, as students of logic
know, has its 'denotation'; and the denotation always means some
reality or content, relationless as extra or with its internal relations
unanalyzed, like the Q which our primitive sensation is supposed to
know. No relation- expressing proposition is possible except on the
basis of a preliminary acquaintance with such 'facts,' with such contents,
as this. Let the Q be fragrance, let it be toothache, or let it be a more
complex kind of feeling, like that of the full-moon swimming in her
blue abyss, it must first come in that simple shape, and be held fast in
that first intention, before any knowledge ABOUT it can be attained.
The knowledge ABOUT it is IT with a context added. Undo IT, and
what is added cannot be CONtext. [Footnote: If A enters and B
exclaims, 'Didn't you see my brother on the stairs?' we all hold that A
may answer, 'I saw him, but didn't know he was your brother';
ignorance of brotherhood not abolishing power to see. But those who,
on account of the unrelatedness of the first facts with which we become
acquainted, deny them to be 'known' to us, ought in consistency to

maintain that if A did not perceive the relationship of the man on the
stairs to B, it was impossible he should have noticed him at all.]
Let us say no more then about this objection, but enlarge our thesis,
thus: If there be in the universe a Q other than the Q in the feeling, the
latter may have acquaintance with an entity ejective to itself; an
acquaintance moreover, which, as mere acquaintance, it would be hard
to imagine susceptible either of improvement or increase, being in its
way complete; and which would oblige us (so long as we refuse not to
call acquaintance knowledge) to say not only that the feeling is
cognitive, but that all qualities of feeling, SO LONG AS THERE IS
ANYTHING OUTSIDE OF THEM WHICH THEY RESEMBLE, are
feelings OF qualities of existence, and perceptions of outward fact.
The point of this vindication of the cognitive function of the first
feeling lies, it will be noticed, in the discovery that q does exist
elsewhere than in it. In case this discovery were not made, we could not
be sure the feeling was cognitive; and in case there were nothing
outside to be discovered, we should have to call the feeling a dream.
But the feeling itself cannot make the discovery. Its own q is the only q
it grasps; and its own nature is not a particle altered by having the
self-transcendent function of cognition either added to it or taken away.
The function is accidental; synthetic, not analytic; and falls outside and
not inside its being. [Footnote: It seems odd to call so important a
function accidental, but I do not see how we can mend the matter. Just
as, if we start with the reality and ask how it may come to be known,
we can only reply by invoking a feeling which shall RECONSTRUCT
it in its own more private fashion; so, if we start with the feeling and
ask how it may come to know, we can only reply by invoking a reality
which shall RECONSTRUCT it in its own more public fashion. In
either case, however, the datum we start with remains just what it was.
One may easily get lost in verbal mysteries about the difference
between quality of feeling and feeling of quality, between receiving and
reconstructing the knowledge of a reality. But at the end we must
confess that the notion of real cognition involves an unmediated
dualism of