The Meaning of Truth | Page 9

the knower and the known. See Bowne's Metaphysics, New
York, 1882, pp. 403-412, and various passages in Lotze, e.g., Logic,

Sec. 308. ['Unmediated' is a bad word to have used.--1909.]]
A feeling feels as a gun shoots. If there be nothing to be felt or hit, they
discharge themselves ins blaue hinein. If, however, something starts up
opposite them, they no longer simply shoot or feel, they hit and know.
But with this arises a worse objection than any yet made. We the critics
look on and see a real q and a feeling of q; and because the two
resemble each other, we say the one knows the other. But what right
have we to say this until we know that the feeling of q means to stand
for or represent just that SAME other q? Suppose, instead of one q, a
number of real q's in the field. If the gun shoots and hits, we can easily
see which one of them it hits. But how can we distinguish which one
the feeling knows? It knows the one it stands for. But which one DOES
it stand for? It declares no intention in this respect. It merely resembles;
it resembles all indifferently; and resembling, per se, is not necessarily
representing or standing- for at all. Eggs resemble each other, but do
not on that account represent, stand for, or know each other. And if you
say this is because neither of them is a FEELING, then imagine the
world to consist of nothing but toothaches, which ARE feelings,
feelings resembling each other exactly,--would they know each other
the better for all that?
The case of q being a bare quality like that of toothache-pain is quite
different from that of its being a concrete individual thing. There is
practically no test for deciding whether the feeling of a bare quality
means to represent it or not. It can DO nothing to the quality beyond
resembling it, simply because an abstract quality is a thing to which
nothing can be done. Being without context or environment or
principium individuationis, a quiddity with no haecceity, a platonic
idea, even duplicate editions of such a quality (were they possible),
would be indiscernible, and no sign could be given, no result altered,
whether the feeling I meant to stand for this edition or for that, or
whether it simply resembled the quality without meaning to stand for it
at all.
If now we grant a genuine pluralism of editions to the quality q, by
assigning to each a CONTEXT which shall distinguish it from its mates,

we may proceed to explain which edition of it the feeling knows, by
extending our principle of resemblance to the context too, and saying
the feeling knows the particular q whose context it most exactly
duplicates. But here again the theoretic doubt recurs: duplication and
coincidence, are they knowledge? The gun shows which q it points to
and hits, by BREAKING it. Until the feeling can show us which q it
points to and knows, by some equally flagrant token, why are we not
free to deny that it either points to or knows any one of the REAL q's at
all, and to affirm that the word 'resemblance' exhaustively describes its
relation to the reality?
Well, as a matter of fact, every actual feeling DOES show us, quite as
flagrantly as the gun, which q it points to; and practically in concrete
cases the matter is decided by an element we have hitherto left out. Let
us pass from abstractions to possible instances, and ask our obliging
deus ex machina to frame for us a richer world. Let him send me, for
example, a dream of the death of a certain man, and let him
simultaneously cause the man to die. How would our practical instinct
spontaneously decide whether this were a case of cognition of the
reality, or only a sort of marvellous coincidence of a resembling reality
with my dream? Just such puzzling cases as this are what the 'society
for psychical research' is busily collecting and trying to interpret in the
most reasonable way.
If my dream were the only one of the kind I ever had in my life, if the
context of the death in the dream differed in many particulars from the
real death's context, and if my dream led me to no action about the
death, unquestionably we should all call it a strange coincidence, and
naught besides. But if the death in the dream had a long context,
agreeing point for point with every feature that attended the real death;
if I were constantly having such dreams, all equally perfect, and if on
awaking I had a habit of ACTING immediately as if they were true and
so getting