BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF M^nvu W. Sage 1891 M^?m ilyBi.L 3777 Cornell University Library B945.L153 W5 What can I know? An inquiry into truth olin 3 1924 029 066 434 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029066434 WHAT CAN I KNOW? By GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD WHAT CAN I KNOW? An Inquiry into Truth, its Nature, the Means of its Attainment, and its Relations to the Practical Life. Crown 8vo. pp. viii-311. WHAT OUGHT I TO DO? An Inquiry into the Nature and Kinds of Virtue and into the Sanctions, Aims, and Values of the Moral Life. Crown 8vo. pp. x-311. WHAT vSHOULD I BELIEVE? An Inquiry into the Nature, Grounds, and Values of the Faiths of Science, Society, Morals, and Religion. [ In preparation ] WHAT MAY I HOPE? An Inquiry into the Sources and Reasonable- ness of Human Hopes, especially the Social and ' Religious. {In preparation] LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. WHAT CAN I KNOW? AN INQUIRY INTO TRUTH, ITS NATURE, THE MEANS OF ITS ATTAINMENT, AND ITS RELATIONS TO THE PRACTICAL LIFE BY GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD, LL.D. LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK LONDON, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA AND MADRAS 1914 COPYRIGHT, I914 BY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. PREFACE ^ 1 1 -/HE asking of questions, and the con- scious, persistent, and deliberate search for their answers, is characteristically human. Even in the quest for the gratification of his appetites, the intellect, volitions, and tastes of man are involved in a quite different way from that which is the case with any of the lower animals. Only man makes a problem demanding thought and exciting anxiety out of the ques- tions: "What shall I eat?" or, "What shall I drink?" or, "What shall I put on?" In answer- ing these and aU similar inquiries, he defers to customs that have estabhshed themselves, not merely in considerations of physical necessity, but also of propriety, aesthetical gratification, and moral obligation. And these considerations are themselves the fruits of reflection, if not on the part of the individual, at least on the part of the clan, tribe, or race, to which the individual belongs. But what is for our present purpose more im- portant to notice, is this: It is characteristic of human reason to ask and pursue the answer of yet more abstract and deeply hidden questions. Some sort of interest in, and of inquiry into, the [iii] PREFACE fundamental problems of science and philoso- phy, has excited the minds of men from the very earliest traceable beginnings of human history. Nor are the motives for this interest wholly con- fined to any imagined physical good or pleasur- able, but as it were ah-extra experiences, which their conjectural answer might promise to aflFord. The intellectual satisfaction which comes from asking and answering questions of every sort — and not by any means least, questions of the most difficult sort — has operated to stimulate the human mind as much as the hope of gaining information available for the more successful conduct of the so-called practical Ufe. Among the questions, the value of right answers to which is found both in the interest of intellec- tual satisfaction and in the successful conduct of life, we may distinguish the following four as easily standing in the front rank. Tersely put in common language, they may well enough take the following form: What can I know.'' What ought I to do? What should I believe? What may I hope? As expressed in this form, they are designedly made closely fitting to the exi- gencies, the opportunities, and the interests of the individual man. As set in the moulds of the different main departments of philosophical dis- cipline, the first and third of these questions might be called "epistemological"; the second "ethical," and the fourth, a question having to do chiefly with certain aesthetical and religious [iv] PREFACE experiences. It is as problems of the personal life that we are proposing briefly to raise and to discuss them. It would be a mistake, however, to think that any of these four questions can ever be raised, much less even provisionally and partially an- swered, as other than as philosophical problems. But this is only to say that they are all problems of reflection, and reflective thin king is the method of all philosophy. Nay! reflective thinking is, essentially considered, the very substance of philosophy. We might go still further — and employing another more offensive word — say that they are all "metaphysical" problems. But we need not be troubled by this manner of desig- nating them. For we may at once remind our- selves of the truth which was clearly enough enunciated as long ago as Aristotle, namely — that every man, inasmuch as he is a man, is also a philosopher. If, then, we say to ourselves "You must not philosophize," the answer of our com- mon nature comes back: "And yet you must philosophize." Inasmuch as metaphysics is noth- ing but some thinker's theory of reality, whether framed in terms of instinctive belief, or of the most elaborate and systematic form of reasoned argument, every man is also bound to be either a naive or a more or less trained metaphysician. Neither does the man who thinks of himself as a thorough-going agnostic, or as a complete empiri- cist of the most new-fashioned sort, escape the [v] PREFACE charge of being intellectually more noble than he esteems himself to be. He, too, is a born philosopher. Even a momentary attention to the language in which these four questions have been couched, suggests certain prominent features, which, while relating them and making them inter-de- pendent, serve to emphasize their differences. To raise the question. What can I know.'' indi- cates a problem that emphasizes ability. To ask, What ought I to do? introduces and lays stress upon the idea of obligation. But to inquire further. What shall I believe.'' suggests a min- gling of prudence, dependent upon rational con- siderations, with a certain kind of obligation: while. What may I hope? seems to be mainly a question of privilege. Further reflection reveals the fact that they build upon one another in the order in which they have been named. The question. What can I know? is for every man fundamental and controlling in his attempt to find answers to the other three questions. We shall, therefore, consider this question first of all. [vi] CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. The Meaning op the Question .... 1 n. What Is It to Know? ... ... 24 m. On Thinking One's Way Through a Subject 53 IV. On Being Suke of What We Know . 83 V. Degrees and Limits of Knowledge. . . 108 VI. What May the Knowek Take fok Granted? 134 Vn. On the Worth and Way op Self-Knowledge 160 Vin. Agnostics and People of Common-Sense . 186 IX. Knowledge and Reality 212 X. What is the Use of Knowing? . . . 241 XI. The Value of the Men Who Know . 258 Xn. Can a Man Know God? 279 To the Seekers after Truth: " Shall we not look into the . . . things that seem. And things that be, and analyze Our double nature f" WHAT CAN I KNOW? CHAPTER I TEE MEANING OF THE QUESTION '^HE question, What can I know? when seriously put to himself by the indi- vidual man, suggests a variety of answers from different points of view. In a general way, it is, of course, a question of personal ability. As asked by the student preparing for an exam- ination, by the lawyer making ready his brief for the conduct of a particular case, by the doctor attempting the diagnosis of an obscure disease, by the business man considering some new finan- cial enterprise, or even by the applicant for a position as cook or gardener, it is an inquiry into the equipment of skill and energy required for the accompKshing of certain practical ends. In all these cases, the question involves the assump- tion of a store of information, already obtained or easily obtainable, which can be put at the service of another question: What can I do? The solution of problems of accomplishment de- pends upon the solution of problems of knowl- edge. Thus the more precise form which the problem of knowledge takes in the daily life of [IJ WHAT CAN I KNOW? all of us may be stated in somewhat the follow- ing fashion: What can I know about how best to do what it is my particular, personal calling, duty, or interest to do? Even when asked in this seemingly limited and rather manageable way, the question is more com- plicated than at first sight appears. The inquiry, What can / know? if I consider all that I have ever observed or otherwise learned as incorpo- rated into myself, involves the very fundamental and complex inquiry: What sort of knowing personality am I? And to answer this inquiry at all fully would require an incredible amount of knowledge about human selfhood, in general, and about my self in particular. For I am a member of a race which is supposed to be endowed with, or in an interminably long series of develop- ments has acquired, certain rather definitely limited faculties of knowledge. Moreover, I came into the world with an ancestral inJieritance which, in its so-called cognitive aspect, may be deemed a capacity for knowledge. This inherited capacity reaches backward into the dim recesses of the remotest past of human history; for, al- though my parents may be supposed to have con- tributed most liberally to my inheritance, they by no means contributed all. Many a man is forced to the belief that the advice of the Ameri- can wit, to have chosen another kind of woman for his grandmother, is no unmeaning witticism. Indeed, choosing one's grandmother, if it were [2] THE MEANING OF THE QUESTION possible, would be for any man ambitious of distinction for inherited capacity of knowledge, an exceedingly serious piece of business. But above all, when any thoughtful man raises the inquiry as to what he can do thoroughly weU, because he knows all that is to be known about how to do that particular thing, he is apt to revert in memory to the use he has made in the past of opportunity for the development of his inherited capacity. Then memories of unem- ployed and neglected opportimities, like sad spectres of departed friends, intercourse with whom during life we too much neglected, come trooping into the mind. These memories empha- size the importance of having and improving opportunities. All the while, from the hour of birth, and even before birth and the moment of conception, powerful influences over which neither his ances- tors nor himself have had much control, have been working to determine the answer, for every individual, of the question, "What can I know?" I refer to that comphcated network of contrib- uting forces and elements which may be grouped together under the term "environment." We have something to say about selecting these: some Uttle to say about constituting and shap- ing them. It is they, indeed, that constitute our opportunities. But, on the whole, they have much more to say about what we shall be and do, than we have to say as to what they shall [3] WHAT CAN I KNOW? make us to be and what they shall fit us to do. Hence the foolishness and the irreligion of the Pharisee's prayer when he thanked God that he was "not as other men are," A very good prayer this, if offered in humility and gratitude rather than in self-conceit and pride. After all else is said, however, it must not be forgotten that the problem of knowledge is for every individual a question of ability; and that all questions of ability, as applied to the human species, imply a certain so-called freedom of will. Whether this freedom of will is specious or not, and even what we are to imderstand by the term "freedom of the wUl," we need not inquire at the present time. Whether it is wholly determined for the Self by inheritance and environment, or is in part at least acquired by the Self, as arising out of the mysterious and inexplicable source of finite personal development, does not change the meaning of our problem. We all judge our- selves, and all judge all others as though the answer to the inquiry into a man's ability to know depended to some extent upon whether he himself really wished and determinedly willed to know. It is true that our system of modem education is largely neglecting and corrupting this ele- ment of the determined will. It is cultivating a reluctant receiving of knowledge on the part of our children and youth, rather than a strenu- ous getting of knowledge, no matter what the [4] THE MEANING OF THE QUESTION price to be paid by way of personal effort may be. But after all, a part of the teacher's voluntary exertions to make cognitive impressions on his pupils must take the direction of arousing the activities of interest and its accompaniment of attention. Some loill to know necessarily reacts in the form of an increase to knowing abihty. It is impossible to expand the mind by pouring material into it as into a vessel that is already overflowing its capacity. Even the feeblest effort to receive increases receiving capacity. As soon, however, as youth or man seriously undertakes the learning of anything, be it football, or carpen- try, or banking, or some profession, he finds that knowledge cannot well be put into one mind by another; that, on the contrary, one must put one's self into the knowledge, in order to make it one's own. And putting one's self into the task of learning is an act of will. The answer to the problem. What I can know? therefore always depends in a measure upon the decision of the question : " What do I will to know? " We must distinguish, then, four main classes of considerations which enter in a large and fundamental way into the solution for every indi- vidual of the important problem of knowledge. These considerations affect him as (1) a member of the hiuman species; (2) as endowed with a certain inherited capacity; (3) as fostered or con- fined and thwarted by a certain environment; and (4) as an individual willing to know. [5] WHAT CAN I KNOW? Let us now give a brief consideration to each one of these four conditions, which inevitably determine the quaUty and amount of his knowl- edge for every individual man. And first of all, the question. What can I know? depends upon the answer to the question, What can men in general know? For the biological law appears here in full force; the individual member of the species has, at the base of his individuality, all of the relatively few but fundamental characteris- tics of the species to which he belongs. Any son Tfiay surpass his own father, and indeed all his ancestors to the remotest past, in the accuracy and range of his knowledge; but no son of human- ity can reasonably hope to surpass his race in respect of the things which he knows, or the certainty with which he knows what he knows. To say this, however, is not to deny the possi- bility of an unending chain of new discoveries for the race, or of a ceaseless future development of its knowledge; it is not even to say to any individual, "You can never hope to make any new discoveries or to contribute in some sub- stantial way to the increase of human knowl- edge." What, then, is the theoretical significance of this agnostic declaration; and what is the prac- tical good of bearing the truth somewhat con- stantly in mind? That human knowledge is limited as to its character and as to its range by the nature of human capacity is a declaration as obvious as it [6] THE MEANING OF THE QUESTION is theoretically vague and practically useless. There have been men of learning and men of science, as well as students and teachers of metaphysics, who have held that all human knowledge is vain as a guaranty of truth about the nature of physical realities; and yet more vain as to establishing the rational conviction that there exist in reality any spiritual beings. This wide-reaching negative conclusion they are accus- tomed to establish on the ground of the limited nature of human knowing capacity. But their argument often seems to amount to saying: "There is no human knowledge (worth calling such) because aU our knowledge is human." This may provoke the not altogether unreason- able inquiry: "What other kind of knowledge than human knowledge would you consider it possible for human beings to have?" Of course, however, such play upon words constitutes no satisfactory argument either for or against a pretty thorough-going agnosticism. It should, however, excite interest in the personal problem as regarded from this point of view. And now when we ask those who have made this problem of the nature and fixed limits of man's knowing capacity, the subject of long study and profound reflection, although finally we obtain much additional light, our first impres- sions are apt to be those of increased doubt and confusion of thought. We cannot deny that all man's knowledge is limited, and that it is all [7] WHAT CAN I KNOW? relative to his faculties and to an implied corres- pondence, which must largely, if not wholly, be taken for granted, of the nature of the human mind to the nature of the things which the human mind knows, or at least thinks that it knows. But as to how far this limitation and this rela- tivity vitiate all human knowledge and make it only a specious and false rather than a true pic- ture of reality, we find by no means a perfect agreement. We are then, it is likely, tempted to dismiss the whole subject as unworthy of serious consideration, especially for the man who is most devoted to the concrete practical interests of the daily life. In this so highly " practical " age, all discussion of so-called " epistemological " prob- lems is quite too apt to be made a matter of pub- lic scorn. But if we give further pause to this impulse, we may then conclude that to follow it is neither honorable to our native regard for the rights of human reason, nor quite prudent in the in- terests of the best conduct of life. For many men have bruised themselves badly, or even quite dashed out their brains and been taken to the mad- house, or buried in untimely graves, because they have persisted in throwing themselves against the walls that limit all the mental activities of humanity. But, on the contrary, others falling into a condition of distrust, or even of despair, with regard to the progressive conquest of the world of reality by the human mind, have lost [8] THE MEANING OF THE QUESTION their ambition to know and their faith and hope, with regard to the things invisible, of art, moral- ity, and religion. All of which may serve to emphasize the hygienic maxim: Keep the con- stitution of your mind healthy with regard to this subject. In both extreme directions there are lurking peculiar dangers that not only warp one's speculative opinions, but also, and no less surely, ill condition the conduct of the practical life. Away back in Plato's time we find a dictum ascribed to the Sophist Protagoras, which is reported to have run as follows: "Man is the measure of all things; of that which is, how it is; of that which is not, how it is not." In various forms some such dictum has been made the basis of a theory of knowledge which, from a premise of conceded relativity, goes on to the conclusion of the complete untrustworthiness of all human faculty. But when Socrates, dis- cussing the subject with the youthful Theaetetus addresses to him the following banter, he hints at the fallacy which lurks in every such syllogism. "I say nothing against his doctrine," says Soc- rates, "that what appears to each one to be, really is to each one, but I wonder that he did not begin his great work on Truth with a declara- tion that a pig or a dog-faced baboon or some other strange monster which has sensation, is the measure of all things." Now, since no modem agnostic would assert that these other animals' measure of reality by their sensations [9] WHAT CAN I KNOW? is to be put on a par for trustworthiness with the measuring reason of man, we must know some- thing thorough about the measuring power of the latter, before we can be credibly raised to the heights of intellectual pride or plunged in the depths of agnostic despair. The measure of reason itself, the great philoso- pher Immanuel Kant aimed to discover by a very special, patient and elaborate method of research. His conclusion was that knowledge, whatever the object, is only of phenomena, and that by the intellectual or scientific method of pursuit we can only know of both physical and spiritual realties that they are, but never in this way, what they are. But here again the door was opened so that the inquiring mind might enter into all the most assured and rational con- fidences as to God, the soul, and immortality, through the faiths that are constitutive and indestructible for human moral reason. And to the man chiefly interested in things of the highest value it is surely well worth while to know that, if he may not have knowledge, he may at least have a reasonable faith respecting them. Rather more than a half-century ago there arose another brave attempt to limit human knowledge in an absolute way, which drew to itself the name of "Agnosticism" -par excellence, as it were, and which prevailed widely for an entire generation. I refer, of course, to the theory of Mr. Herbert Spencer. As stated in [10] THE MEANING OF THE QUESTION its simplest form at the close of the second chap- ter in his book on First Principles, this theory bases itself on the assumption "that the power which the universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable." From this assumption follows a negative view of the relativity of all knowledge, including "the ultimate scientific ideas." In such a way we are promised that we shall secure the positive benefits of a complete and final reconciliation of science and religion. But lest we find the promise false and deadly to the higher life, we remind ourselves that Mr. Spencer is himself siu*e above all other things of the existence of this Power, of its unity, and of the important truth that It is back of the Universe and is manifested in the Universe. It may well be, therefore, a matter of the utmost speculative interest and of the gravest practical import, it may even be a matter of prudence and of duty to inquire: "As being what kind of a Power does Mr. Spencer's Unknowable manifest itself in the Universe? " Enough has, however, been said at this stage in our inquiry to show that we cannot lightly dismiss the call to reflection upon the imalter- able conditions, if such there be, which determine the answer to the personal question, "What can 7 know?" as these conditions grow out of the uncontested fact: I am a human being, the child of a race characterized by certain limited powers of knowledge. [11] WHAT CAN I KNOW? Not in the same way, but still of no inconsider- able value as contributing to sanity in all attempts to answer the personal question, is an intimate acquaintance with the persistently unsuccessful attempts at solving certain problems of knowl- edge that have been made by other men in the past. Among such attempts we might instance the discovery of the exact proportional relation of the diameter of a circle to its circumference, as stated in terms of a series of decimals: or, again, the method of constructing a piece of mechanism that shall eliminate absolutely aU loss of energy from friction, dissipation of heat, etc., and so shall become capable of what is called "perpetual motion." All the lunatic asylums in the world would not really contain a moiety of the men and women who have gone mad in the attempt to know the answer to questions that were for them at least, from the very start, unanswerable. And many more there are in asylums and in prisons and in hopeless and unhappy homes, who would not be thus placed, if they had not too quickly and incontinently concluded that they could not know of the existence of a good God, of a soul of their own and in their own keeping, and of the reasonableness of the grounds for a hope of immortality. There is no more certain fact, none more impor- tant for every human life, than this; that every individual's physical and mental faculties are to [12] THE MEANING OF THE QUESTION a large extent determined for him by ancestral inheritance. But the combined efforts of the biological and psychological sciences have thus far been able to accomplish very little toward establishing in indisputable form the particular laws which secure and control this general fact. In the case of persons of unusual talents and of the few men and women of genius, some antici- patory traces of promise can generally be dis- covered, wherever a sufficiently full history of the previous generations can be obtained. But even in these cases the explanation on grounds of inheritance is often quite xmsatisfactory or en- tirely conjectural; and in all cases it is only very partially successful as accounting for all of any individual's peculiarities. As to the vast multi- tude of mankind, — what, if we treat human beings with a measure of the contempt we bestow upon some of the lower animals we may call the "common herd," — science never has had, and never will have, sufficient data for a universally applicable induction. The difficulties which beset the attempt to solve oiu" personal equation, between the forth- putting of energy and the practical value of the result, are similar when the problem is approached from this point of view, to those which are en- countered when we come upon it by way of speculation as to the essentially agnostic condi- tion of the entire human race. Indeed, in some respects, the problem of inheritance is the more [13] WHAT CAN I KNOW? difficult problem. For, as I shall undertake to show later on, it is not at all impossible by reflec- tion to get such an estimate of the inescapable limitations of all human knowledge as to secure us against the majority of our practical blunders in this direction. But he would be a very foolish pretender, a very charlatan in biology, who would undertake to expound the hygiene and thera- peutics of the average man's mental equipment and achievements, in the light of a full knowledge of his inheritance. Yet biological, and more especially psychological, science, if not infallible guides, are certainly prepared to be of no small assistance to the individual man in preparing an answer to the question: What can I know? And within limits, every intelligent and observing person can learn to be his own biologist, his own psychologist. Fortunately, nature often, if not generally (and certainly not universally) plants in the individual longings, intimations, ambi- tions, which correspond in a valuable way to his inherited capacities. It would undoubtedly be better to say that the longings, intimations, ambi- tions, and the answering native capacities, are different parts or aspects of the same inheri- tance. Hence the trials which fathers have when they insist on driving into a trade or into business the son who has been born (as something more than merely his father's son) with an ambition and a capacity for being an artist or a musician. But longings and ambitions to be distinguished [14] THE MEANING OF THE QUESTION in some kind of learning or technical skill are no sure guide to judgment as to one's inherited capacity. Perhaps pitiful mistakes are as plenti- ful as splendid successes on the part of those who trust themselves to this sort of guidance. Men and women of rare talents, or even of genius, have children who inherit neither their ability to know nor their desire to know. From the very nature of the case, no individual in the earlier stages of his development can know enough about his own inheritance to make much use of this knowledge in the solution of the personal problem. Boys and girls know less about the capacities and natural dispositions of their parents than their parents, as a rule, know about them. And to make the little information about one's ancestral inheritance which one can gather early enough to be of any good, the major premise of the required syllogism would be as unpractical as illogical. In fact, few attempt such a line of argument. Yet after all has been said by way of discourage- ment, enough remains to make it the part of wisdom for every man to take an occasional in- ventory of his "born" capacity for knowledge, and to derive encouragement from a painstaking esti- mate of its net assets. But the items on the basis of which this inventory must be made are for the most part items in the experience of our- selves with ourselves. We look at the daguerreo- type or miniature painting which preserves the f ea- [15] WHAT CAN I KNOW? tures of the decrepit man or aged dame, who died more than fifty years ago; we start with surprise at the discovery, how much, as we grow old, we are coming to develop the same characteristic features. Then we remember traits of mentality or of disposition belonging to these same old people; and again the feeling of surprise grows more slowly within us as we recognize how surely we seem to be developing the same traits. It is possible to an increasing extent for experi- mental psychology to assist self-observation in the discovery and partial remedy of inherited defects and in the improvement of inherited apti- tudes. For example, if one has been born tone- deaf, one may be spared the disappointment of trying to learn music; or if born color-blind, the disappointment of trying to become a painter. So, too, one with a "good ear" but lacking in delicacy of tactual sensations can be assured that he can never know how to play the violin. Any well-appointed psychological laboratory can save scores of young women who aspire to sing in grand opera from the vain expenditure of time and money and the bitter sense of failure at the end. By less obvious and direct methods, and in a somewhat less conclusive fashion, one can find out by a kind of preliminary skirmishing, whether one is to be helped or hindered by one's inheritance in the long struggle to become master of some form of science, or manufacture; of business, or handi- [16] THE MEANING OF THE QUESTION craft, or profession, or political or diplomatic pursuit. But all the while from birth onward, and even before birth the answer to the problem, "What can I know? is for every individual man largely a matter of environment. Much deep digging in the garden of knowledge requires, not only strong hands and back and a sturdy will, but more or less specialized tools and appliances. It is true that judgment enables one to make a judicious selection among these tools, and that a determined will can supply some of the defi- ciencies which consist in being without them. But the more the positive sciences advance, and the contrivances for doing things promptly and effectively are increased, the more is the individ- ual dependent for his full relative available share of the world's knowledge, on his environment. Yet even such considerations as those just hinted at, do not set forth the deeper significance of influence from our surroundings. It is environ- ment acting upon inheritance which shapes the personal characteristics themselves; and this in no dubious or trifling fashion. The training, or lack of training, in the family life; the instruction and discipline, or lack of both, in the school life; the thousand influences by way of imitation, example and teaching which have surrounded us in the form of companionships, friendships, and all kinds of social relations; all these have con- spired to make us what we are, whether our [17] WHAT CAN I KNOW? reactions have been chiefly those of acceptance or of resistance. For what a man hates and fights has quite as much to say as to what a man shall be, as what a man loves and adopts. That natural and honorable feeling of opposition to injustice which, under favoring circumstances, might have developed into the appreciations and sympathies most helpful to the reformer, under unfavorable circumstances becomes the bitter and murderous hate of the nihilist. Good dispositions are warped or cherished, bad dispositions are corrected or fostered, according to the soil in which the seed is planted. Most subtle and powerful for good or evil, among all forms of every individual's environ- ment, is opinion, whether as current on the tongues of the community, or lodged in the silent recesses of the common mind, or embodied in the prevalent customs. "Opinion," said the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, "is a falling sickness." And quoth Sir Walter Raleigh: "It is opinion, not truth, that travelleth the world without passport." "Almost every opinion we have," declares the author of, De la Sagesse, "we have but by authority; we believe, act, judge, live and die, on trust, as common custom teaches us: and rightly, for we are too weak to decide and choose for ourselves. But the wise do not act thus." So sharp a line drawn between the wise and the weak is, however, by no means wholly justified by the facts of the case. For it [18] THE MEANING OF THE QUESTION is neither a sign of weakness to be influenced by custom and opinion, nor a sign of wisdom to "decide and choose for ourselves." All depends — upon scores of subordinate and approximate considerations, which are different with every individual man, and which change with every individual from hour to hour. The truly wise man, after long experience in his search for an answer to the question, What can I know? learns to say sometimes, "Get thee behind me Satan," and sometimes, "Welcome as my guide," to the injunctions and solicitations of custom and current opinion. Even in matters of scientific knowledge, the prevalent opinions of those who, as is so expres- sively said, "ought to know," are quite indispen- sable for determining the limitations of oiu: own knowledge, and the directions in which we ought to search, if we wish to know more. In such fields the exploits of a self-conceited ignorance are often most amazing. Witness the numerous letters which we ourselves have received from earnest minds oflfering to submit the products of years of research culminating in the refutal of the law of gravitation or of the estabUshed views as to the constitution of the solar system. In such matters as personal hygiene, medical treat- ment, or business and social morality, every one knows how large is the majority who either take the opinions of their professed leaders and teachers with superstitious reverence or with concealed [19] WHAT CAN I KNOW? or open contempt. How picturesquely are these extremes of mental attitude toward scientific opinion brought out in our courts of justice! But the mind which wishes to make opinion a point of starting and a guide to knowledge will bear in mind the truth of what the late Professor Gibbs once said to the author: "If you want a really infallible expert opinion, you must never consult more than one expert." Into this deep and powerful stream of in- fluences, — environing, hereditary, and essentially human, the individual man is thrown a naked, wailing infant, as unclothed yet sensitive to all kinds of stimuli, in mind and morals, as in body. For a little time his head is held above the current by some more or less friendly hand, while he floats, unheeding and unconscious of the direction in which he is being carried along. At length, this vast collection of amoeboid elements begins to manifest what the English physiologist says it is characteristic of every individual amoeba to manifest, "a wUl of its own." Blind will, it is at first, the bare "will to live," the impulse to take a part in the struggle for existence. The kicks and the strokes of the small swimmer are for a long time little guided by intelligence, less con- trolled by wisdom, and still less heeded by the currents of his life. From the first, however, to the educated and observing eye, traces of the promise of a human sort begin to appear. The young animal is, indeed, developing a soul of bis [20] THE MEANING OF THE QUESTION own; and this soul is acquiring something more than the rudiments of an amoeboid will. The power of selective attention emerges and in- creases; more and more elaborate discriminations begin to be made; traces of moral consciousness and of other judgments of value appear; in a word, the making of a man is in full process. Individuality, that ultimate mystery of existence, is being shaped out of the elements furnished by inheritance and influenced by environment. In view of these phenomena there arises the common opinion, emphasized by the customs, laws and language of all races in all the ages, that the individual himself takes some important part in the making of himself a man. Before leaving this preliminary attempt to fix the meaning of our problem, and to excite an in- terest in its more careful discussion by every man who would develop and use wisely his intellectual powers, there is one other consideration which may properly be brought to the front. The pleasures of the search for truth — just the bare, even if unsuccessful search — have been sung in all ages by poets and by philosophers. Some- thing may be said, then, in favor of the strenuous effort for knowledge, even from the eudaemon- istic point of view. It would indeed be useless to try to^attract the multitude of children to school, or of adults to some form of inquiry or research, simply by depicting the large measure of joy they were going to have in trying to know, whether [21] WHAT CAN I KNOW? they could really hope to succeed in knowing, or not. Both children and adults very promptly ask themselves, and their teachers, and the members of the School Board, "What is the use of studying this or of learning that?" In fact, the utilitarian question seems to be increasingly incisive and more prominent in all our modern system of education. On the whole, it is probably well for the country and for its schools, that this is so. If only we could raise the moral and sesthetical value of the question, without chang- ing its vulgar vigorousness, and render it: "What is the good of studying this or of learning that? " There have been minds, however, who have taken such a keen and exalted joy in all forms of mental exercise — and especially, in that particular form which happened to be for them most exacting and therefore most exhilarating — that they have not hesitated to set the pleasure and benefit of striving for truth above the pleasure and benefit of its possession. That learned Doc- tor, Thomas Aquinas, declared: "The intellect commences in operation and in operation it ends." But the kind of "operation" which pleased this Doctor was theological speculation; and as everybody knows, theological speculation is particularly despised and almost quite tabu for the professed scientist and for the common man in the present day. P^re Malebranche also pro- tested that, "If I held truth captive in my hand, I should open my hand and let it fly, in order that [22] THE MEANING OF THE QUESTION I might again pursue and capture it." And Jean Paul Richter aflBrms: "It is not the goal, but the course, which makes us happy." We do not expect, and we do not desire, to convince the man of sound good sense who asks with us some sort of light upon the question. What can I know? that the joy of its pursuit will amply repay him, whether the pursuit contributes, or not, to the better understanding and at least partial answer to the question itself. In our judgment. Truth is so rare a bird and so hard to capture, that he who once lays his hand thereon would do well to grasp firmly and hold on tight. But we do confidently assiu-e every honest seeker after truth, of whatever sort, and whether the so-called speculative or the so-called practical, that the search, when it is properly regulated and earnestly made, is not only a most honorable but also a most pleasurable exercise of the human mind. And this is especially so, when we seek the truths that have the highest worth. [23] in CHAPTER II WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? ~°/TTE answer to the question, What can I know? if it is to be intellectually satis- fying and practically safe, must depend arge measure upon the conclusions at which we arrive, after raising and reflecting upon another question. This latter question concerns the na- ture of knowledge. If now we were to ask the average man. What is it to know.'* we should probably in the majority of instances be met by either an amused smile or a perplexed stare. For the reflective thinker, bent on getting an induc- tive answer to this so-called "epistemological" inquiry, to imitate Socrates and make a business of eliciting from anybody and everybody his views on the subject, might end in the inquirer being consigned to an asylum as a person of disordered mind. So sure in general the people are that they know what knowledge is. It requires but little serious thought, however, to disabuse any honest mind of this assurance. The popular language suggests unmistakably the serious difficulties which beset the attempt at an off-hand solution of our problem. They also [24] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? just as unmistakably indicate the confusion of thought which prevails upon its nature. Few sayings are more common than such as these: "I used to think that I knew but now I know that I did not"; or, among the vulgar, "I guess I know"; or again; "I ought to know better than you do." So, too, in legal tournaments, dififerent but equally honest witnesses affirm with equal sincerity irreconcilable and contradictory knowl- edges about the same facts; and opposing lawyers bring forward their hired experts to give assured but hopelessly conflicting opinions of the truths involved in hypothetical cases. There is not a wise old man anywhere to be found who is not ready to confess: "I do not now know one-half as much as I thought I knew when I was young." It was a psychologically true witticism of the American humorist who declared, "It is better not to know so much than to know so much that isn't so." In his great work. Critique of Pure Reason, Kant has a chapter which he heads "Of Trowing, Knowing, and Believing." He then goes on to show that the holding anything to be true, or the conviction that our judgment concerning it is valid, may have the three following degrees corresponding to these words. T rawing, is to hold a judgment true with the consciousness that our judgment rests on grounds which are insufficient to produce a firm conviction. If, however, we have the conviction, but can not [25] WHAT CAN I KNOW? place it on suflBcient grounds to produce convic- tion in others ("insufficient objectively" are the words which Kant employs), this is Believing. But Knovring implies both kinds of sufficiency, — conviction for myself, certainty for everybody. It may easily occasion a slight shock of surprise in most minds to be told that there are degrees to knowledge; for is it not common enough to say: "If one really 'knows' anything, why then one knows it," and this is a valid excuse for ending discussion and doubt, at least for the time being. In other words the individual has solved for himself the question. What can I know? in this particular case. Even Kant in this passage is not so much affirming the doctrine that there are degrees of knowledge as the opinion about a so-called "Canon" (or accepted rule) of the faculties of knowledge. He is emphasizing the fact of the most ordinary experience, that men make distinctions in the degrees of conviction and certainty belonging to opinion and belief before either of these reaches the stage which we are pleased to call knowledge. But in order to under- stand the nature and uses of knowledge, we shall be obliged to go a long way beyond the admission of the great German philosopher. For there is in fact an almost indefinite number of scarcely distinguishable degrees of both conviction (Kant's "subjective sufficiency") and certainty ("objec- tive sufficiency") in those mental attitudes which we group together under the one word, knowledge. [26] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? And in this respect — as, indeed, generally — psy- chological science amply confirms the suggestions of the popular speech. Let us now take up for a brief and familiar analysis some of the principal forms in which men quite commonly aflfirm that they know, and what they know, or believe they know, — thus giving a momentary practical solution to our main problem. For surely one can know what one actually does know. As judged by the significant forms which men take for either aflBrmation or denial, there may be said to be about four dif- ferent specific kinds of knowledge; and on these differences of kind, to some extent at least, the differences in the degrees of knowledge are dependent. First of all, we constantly hear men affirming or denying for themselves or others a kind of knowledge that is based on the most immediate and fundamental evidence of their senses. Under the head of this kind of knowl- edge such inquiries as the following often arise: Do you know that (particular) man? or Do you you see that (particular) tree, or the horse which is at this moment ahead of his competitors on the race-course? In all such cases as these it is theoretically possible to poiut toward the object with the finger. The thing we are inquiring about is here or there, either as an actual presence in space or as able to be set up in space by an act of imagination. A somewhat similar, but by no means exactly [27] WHAT CAN I KNOW? the same kind of knowledge, is that of events, as obtained either by the senses or by the evidence of other observers. Such knowledge introduces us to another even more important distinction as effecting the various degrees of knowledge. This is the distinction between knowledge ob- tained by the use of our own senses and knowl- edge obtained by testimony which depends for its trustworthiness upon the accuracy and fidelity of the observations of others. It is popularly sup- posed that a higher degree of knowledge is neces- sarily gained by the man who has sensed the very thing "for himself," as the saying is. But scarcely anything could be further from the truth than this supposition. The testimony of the microscopist who has seen the baleful bacilli in the sputa of his patient suspected of tuberculosis is a thousand- fold more productive both of conviction and of certainty than the failure to see of a dozen differ- ent pairs of uninstructed eyes. Then, on the other hand, we have to reckon with such testi- mony as that of the man who "thrusts his fists against the posts, And still insists he sees the ghosts. " And did not a celebrated Dutch biblical scholar announce some years ago, that he would not be- lieve a miracle even if he saw one with his own eyes? There is a third kind of knowledge, which is particularly subject to degrees of extent, accu- racy, and subjective certainty, and this is knowl- [28] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? edge pertaining to whole classes of objects. Thus we hear one camper-out saying to his fellows: "I know every sort of tree that grows in this part of the State," — the Adirondacks or the Lakes of Maine, — and another responding: "I should not know an oak if I saw one, or the dif- ference between a spruce and a larch." It is this kind of knowledge which the individual learns for himself by repeated observations. It is the knowledge that is taught in schools or in books of science. It is the kind of knowledge that is accumulated by the different generations of the human race, and in the possession of which, rather than in differences as respects intellectual faculties or habits of correct observation, as such, the difference between civilized and savage man chiefly consists. But, finally, there is a kind of knowledge which seems to stand yet more remote from the daily observations of men as to things or events, or even as to entire classes of things. This knowl- edge may be said in some sort to depend on the accumulations of knowledge of events and of their relations to each other, under what are called general principles or laws. But here we are well over into the domain of the invisible, the really mental, or the truly spiritual. For a principle or a law is far less able to be known as testified to by anybody's senses than is a ghost or a miracle. But it is in the knowledge of laws — and may we not also say, of the principles of [29] WHAT CAN I KNOW? the invisible world of science, art, morality and religion? — that the growth of reason itself, and the increasing ability to order aright the conduct of liffe, mainly consists, both for the individual and for the race. It is plain, almost at first blush, that all these kinds of knowledge, — knowledge that and knowl- edge what, knowledge of and knowledge about — admit of almost infinite degrees of conviction on the knower's part, and of ability to convince others with a "sufficient" degree of certainty. This aspect of the answer to the question. What can I know? does not, however, so much concern us at the present time. What we now wish to do is, the rather, to distinguish those elements which are common to these and, if there be more, all kinds of knowledge, as a help in solving the problem. What is it to know? To reject all acts and kinds of mental attitudes and mental per- formances which do not attain what Kant calls a "sufficiency" of conviction and certainty, on the groimd that they are not "real knowledge," would sadly limit our intellectual horizon, and make unsafe and erratic the conduct of the prac- tical life. For in philosophy, as in other forms of business, it is poor policy to throw away what you have, or need not be hopeless about getting, because you despair, at the outset of endeavor, of getting all you would like to have. What we notice first as to the words common to the affirmation of the knowledge of all kinds [30] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? of objects, — be they individual things and persons, or single events and so-called facts (which always, of necessity have the nature of events), or entire classes of things, or the most general laws and abstract principles — what we notice as to the words common to them all, I say, is that they announce, or imply, some particular knower, some one or some number of persons, that has the knowledge. In brief, knowledge, however the objects known may differ, always has essentially the same kind of a subject. It is always, "I know," or "he knows," or "they know." And he who makes the affirmation assumes, as a matter of course, that he to whom the statement is made, knows by his own experi- ence what it is to know. This is, to some extent at least, because the knower is himself aware of what has gone on in his own mind when he has arrived at the judgments which carry with them the kind of conviction of their own verity, and the kind of certainty about the existence and nature of their object, which are characteristic of all knowledge. And yet the analysis of the simplest act of knowledge taxes the resources (yes! over-taxes and far surpasses) of the most learned and elaborate system of psychology. Upon some of the more important points in this analysis, there is far from beiag anything like a complete agreement. Because we are trying to help any intelligent inquirer to answer in a useful manner the question, [31J WHAT CAN I KNOW? What is it to know? as well as because we should surely be detected of professional arrogance, if we attempted to give a complete and universally accepted answer, we shall make no full parade of our theory of the psychology of cognition. To call back, or to call up for the first time some of the things which any reader may test by his own experiences, will quite suffice the present necessities. Even this must be done in all hon- esty of the confession that there are not a few theories current with regard to the nature of knowledge which are not easily verifiable by any one's experience. From the point of view, then, of the subject of the act of knowledge, of the knower himself, we may safely say that, whenever he knows, he is conscious, if not of knowing, at least, in know- ing. There have been those, and among the best of psychologists, who have maintained that there can be no single act of knowledge, how- ever simple, without the knower knowing him- self as the subject of the act. But this seems rather to complicate than to assist in explaining matters; and besides it does not correspond altogether well with our experiences by way of knowing. Most of these experiences are best covered, so far as our conscious activity is con- cerned, by just saying, "/ know" this or that; and to say thus much is to say enough about it. I am not in the least aware of any reference to my Self, as knower. But no psychologist would [32] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? be bold enough to try to convince the "plain man" that when he knows anything he, the knower, can be totally unconscious. Many mental performances, and some of them of a very startling character, are in these days ascribed to "imconscious mind." This mind, which in some mysterious manner is related to our mind, seems to know a good many things about our selves and about other matters, of which we have little or no conscious knowledge. Now whatever feel- ing of attraction or of aversion we may have toward such a phrase as "unconscious mind," (and the writer must confess to a rather strong feeling of aversion), to speak of an absolutely unconscious act of knowledge, is to utter a real, as well as a verbal, monstrosity. So, too, we may hsten long and eagerly to the story and the explanation of the phenomena of double and triple personality. We may remind ourselves that not a few savage peoples have "gone" the most extreme of the modern psycholo- gists more than "one better," and have ascribed to every human being five or even seven souls. We may otirselves be of the opinion that these, as well as all similar abnormal phenomena, can best be explained by extensions and combina- tions of accepted principles of the science of mental life; or we may dissent from this opinion. We may agree, or not, with the late Professor James when he says: "The definition of psy- chology may best be given in the words of Pro- [33] WHAT CAN I KNOW? fessor Ladd, as the description and explanation of states of consciousness as such." Perhaps, after all, one soul is enough for any man, if only it is enough of a soul. However, this may be, as a matter of theory, not one of these persons or souls, subconscious or unconscious so far as we are concerned, can possibly be conceived of as performing an act of knowledge, while itself in a state of unconsciousness. We may be sure of one point, then, in our answer to the question. What is it to know? Namely, that it is to be consciously active. The knower is always in some sort a doer. That to know is always to be active, that all knowing is doing — in the wider but quite legiti- mate significance of the latter term — deserves a word further in its explanation. When we summon ourselves or others to any particular act of knowledge through the senses, we are apt to utter some exhortation like this: "Look there," or "Listen to that, will you!" or "Taste this," or "Smell of that," etc. In matters of knowl- edge that concern complex events or facts, or classes of things, or laws and general principles, we demand consideration of evidence, the weigh- ing of argument, thoughtful examination, or other forms of prolonged and concentrated atten- tion. But attention — more or less intense and extensive, and more or less under the control of will — is the accompaniment of all forms and degrees of consciousness, pre-eminently so, when [34] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? it is a case of the serious attempt at an act of knowledge. Especially is this active consciousness which is involved in all knowledge emphasized by the work of learning to know. To leam well one must be diligent, must observe and study, must do something more than passively submit to impressions. Even in the receiving or rejecting of impressions, the mind is active; activity and passivity, in ever shifting proportions, charac- terize every phase and every moment of the mental life of man. But the side of activity must come ceaselessly to the front, at least in the dis- criminating, selecting, and interpreting of im- pressions, if the convictions and certainty which belong to the completed act of knowledge are to be attained. As to the more particular form of conscious mental activity involved in every act of knowl- edge, the so-called faculties summoned into action by the challenge which is thrown out from every object of knowledge in our experience from day to day, we will briefly mention two of the specif- ically intellectual order. These are recognition as dependent on memory and association, and thinking in the more restricted meaning of the term. The former is ordinarily so spontaneous and instantaneous that it seems to imply little or no activity on the knower's part; while the latter is often so exacting of his efforts as to be considered the very hardest thing a man can do. [35] WHAT CAN I KNOW? In order, however, to produce the kind of recog- nition which a satisfactory act of knowledge requires, we are not infrequently obliged to try ta remember, to "think up" the object of knowl- edge; and, on the other hand, in the case of men trained to think in any particular line, the thoughts often flow in unbidden so fast upon the mind that they need to be chastened and restrained rather than stimulated. True recognition, or that re-knowing which is indispensable to all elaborate knowledge and to all growth of knowledge, is no merely animal performance. In the way in which it enters into, not only all science and all speculative thinking, but also not less into the conduct of the life of the man of common-sense, it is a thoroughly human faculty. We describe the stupid man or the idiot as one who does not "know a thing even when he sees it"; and with respect to truths that belong to the realm of highest values we are told, by the great Teacher, of those "who have eyes but see not," and who "have ears but they hear not." All this is to say that in the com- monest everyday knowledge of things by the use of the senses, the completion of the process (and it always is a process, however promptly and completely consummated) of recognition is essen- tial. " Who i5 that man?" "What is that thing?" "I do not recognize him, or it," — this is quite the equivalent of "I do not know." But as we come out of the fixed stare, with the accompaniment [36] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? of an effort at reminiscence, we reply: "Ah! now I recognize him"; or "I see it is not what at first I thought it was." To account more fully for this process which we have called recognition, as an essential of every act of knowledge, psychologists have been wont to divide the whole among three, or more, different but contributory faculties. These have been called "retention," "reminiscence" or "rec- ollection," and "reproduction"; and all of them are under the control of the so-called "association of ideas." Strictly speaking, every one of these terms is almost purely figurative, and we know little or nothing about the psycho-physical or the mental facts which they are designed to express, but quite too often are so employed as, the rather, to conceal. According to the son of the great Scaliger: "My father declared, that of the causes of three things in particular, he was wholly ignorant, — of the interval of fevers, of the ebb and flow of the sea, and of reminiscence." Modern science has undoubtedly done more to reveal the causes of the first two, than of the last one, of these classes of obscure phenomena. We continue to speak of a retentive memory and, perhaps, we have no better word to suggest the familiar facts of daily experience. Some men remember much better than other men; all men remember some tilings better than other things; although there are a few minds which seem to have a sort of imi- [37] WHAT CAN I KNOW? versal memory. Carefully examined, however, such universality usually turns out to be rather confined to certain subjects or classes of facts, and retentive, even for these, only in a degree much superior to the average mind. But what is of the greatest practical importance to know is this: every man has peculiarities of memory, inherited or acquired; and every man's memory, and so his power of recognition as involved in all knowledge, is dependent on the fulfilment of certain conditions over which he has some, but only a partial control. It becomes every man, therefore, in answering for himself the question. What can I know.? to keep before him the impor- tant part which reknowing plays in the answer to the other question: "What is it to know?" Suppose that we have undertaken the slow and perhaps painful task of completing the thorough knowledge of some thing, some fact, some law of nature or of the statute-book, some ideal or prin- ciple of morals and religion. We wish to retain for future use this acquisition of new and im- portant knowledge. If every item of knowledge slips from us as soon as it is completed, how shall there be any growth of knowledge? We will, therefore, stow it away in our minds. Stow it away in our minds! But how shall we get at this storehouse of the mind; and having reached it, with what key shall we lock behind us, so to leave our knowledge in safekeeping, its mysteri- ous door? Again, when we need this once ac- [38] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? quired knowledge to serve some special use, or to be a point of starting, a guide, and a support for more knowledge, how shall we get it out of its storehouse, and make it anew an act of the conscious mind? We must recollect it; we must perform the act of remiaiscence. But reminis- cence and retention are not the same, though both are necessary to recognition, and so to knowledge. The man who had one of the most remarkable memories — in the larger sense of the word as implying an immense store of available knowledge — the elder Scaliger, made this dis- tinction as applicable at least in his own case. "1 caU memory the conservation of this or that item of knowledge. I call reminiscence, the repetition of the mental procediu-e, which had lapsed from memory." Of himself, although he was able to commit Homer to memory in twenty-one days, and all the Greek poets in three months, he de- clared: "I have not a good memory, but a good reminiscence; proper names do not easily recur to me, but when I think on them I find them out." It is sound psychology, as well as a matter of popular understanding, that imagination has much to do, both for good and for evil, with the ease and the accuracy of our recognition, and so with the range and the accuracy of our knowl- edge. The man who can best imagine how things looked, or sounded, or felt, when he was learning to know them, can best recognize the same things when he meets them anew, as the objects already [39] WHAT CAN I KNOW? familiar to his faculty for knowing. The imagina- tion of the scientific man must — to employ an expressive figure of speech — carry about a so- called "schema," or half -abstract conception, of the many individual things with the knowledge of which his specialty is concerned, and the great discoverers in science and speculative thinking, as well as the great inventors and reformers, must have minds of far more than ordinary powers of imagination. It is said of the late Lord Kelvin that he never believed in any theory of the uni- verse until he was able to construct an imaginary machine after the analogy of the theory. Once more, it is matter both of expert and of popular understanding, that the images of past acts of knowledge, as they make recognition possible and so enter into and condition every new act of knowledge, sustain complicated and sub- tle relations to each other. They suggest one another, control by their groupings the direction of our sensations, and shut off our thoughts in preferred directions, that are either cheerfully accepted by our voluntary efforts or against which we struggle, often in vain. If these relations are of the more immediate and inseparable sort, we may speak of them as the "fusion" of mental images or so-called ideas. If they are of a some- what more mediate and more analizable sort, we may follow the language current among the Eng- Hsh School, headed by the Mills, father and son, and speak of them as "associations" of the ideas. [40] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? In explaining the fact of recognition, and the peculiarities which belong to different minds and different occasions, we may then make much of the* "laws of the association of ideas." But neither by fusion nor by association of the mental images of past acts of knowledge can we explain the mysterious experience of recognition. There is always to be reckoned with, the active, con- sciously discriminating mind, facing the new object of knowledge under the predominating, but never quite complete, control of the results of past experiences of knowledge. It is this re-know- ing which is the distinctively non-physical, human and rational performance in every act of finished recognitive memory. AH that has been said hitherto, and especially what has just been said about the fusion and association of ideas, tends to emphasize the indi- vidual nature of the problem offered in the words. What can / know? It shows how dependent its answer is upon the answer to another problem: What is it for me, as an individual mind, really to know? Stores of memory may be lying in reserve, or may be wholly lacking in my store- house, which absolutely determine the character and the extent of the recognition which I can give, to things, to facts, and to laws, as well as to the moral principles which are accepted by me as worthy to control my conduct in intellectual and practical affairs. The definitely personal, the integral, character [41] WHAT CAN I KNOW? of this equipment of capacity and habits of recognition may be further illustrated and em- phasized by referring to the distinction already made between the "fusion" and the "associa- tion" of ideas. The distinction cannot, indeed, be made in any absolute or fixed way, but it is real enough to serve well our present purpose. These "fusions" of the elements derived from past experiences constitute what is popularly called one's idea or conception of a thing. The "associations" awakened by every new act of knowledge may, the rather, be denominated the true answer which the conscious knower gives to the question. What do you think of, or about, the thing? or, often, merely the answer to the ques- tion, What does the thing suggest to you? The wide differences between the ideas awak- ened in different minds by the same word was once illustrated for the writer in the following amusing and startling manner. He was giving a famiKar talk on the subject to an audience which included the intellectual extremes, of a group of immature and thoughtless girls and the cele- brated astronomer (no ordinary thinker on phil- osophical problems). Prof. Charles A. Young. It was agreed that when a certain unannounced word was "sprung" upon the audience by the lecturer every hearer should notice and report the first conscious impression. The word "Lion ! " was selected and uttered in a somewhat dramatic fashion. One young woman could report noth- [42] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? ing but an involuntary shudder; the professor saw a perfectly clear visual picture of the con- stellation Leo arise in the heavens of the mind's eye. If now these spontaneous fusions had been elaborated by each one's being required to think out the meaning of the word Lion, the differences would have been of another kind, and by no means so obviously great. But they would still have been most important and equally dependent upon what the activity of reminiscence could recover from the bits of knowledge stored up in the past. In this activity of reminiscence, the discipline of will always takes a most important part. Set to, and held down to, work, it produces one result; let wander and play, it produces quite another result. When subdued by the power of habit, the associations may so enslave the mind as to destroy its power of recognizing some particular form of reality or application of sesthetical, moral, or religious principle. The knower becomes like Shy lock, who confesses: "I should not see the sandy hour-glass run. But I should think of shallows and of flats. And see my wealthy Andrew docked in sand." How inevitable it all was, this same victim ac- knowledges by the question: "Should I go to church. And see the holy edifice of stone. And not bethink me straight of dang'rous rocks?" [43] WHAT CAN I KNOW? The importance of thinking for the result of accurate and full knowledge is generally recog- nized: as mere fact, then, it needs no enforce- ment. If you want really to know, you must think, is among the most familiar and universally accepted of didactic exhortations. But how think, how much think, and whether or when to trust to intuition and feeling rather than to thought to furnish the excitement and the guide to conduct, are by no means uncomplicated or easily answerable inquiries. Yet, the answer given to these inquiries is a chief determinant in the solution of the problem. What can I know.'' as well as in the practical problem. What shall I do, as one knowing what one is about.? It will, therefore, receive in the next chapter an appro- priate separate treatment. It is enough at present to note that, even in all the most prompt and seemingly immediate recognition, and knowl- edge through recognition, some thinking or traces of past thinking are inevitably involved. The leap to the glad judgment with which we recognize that human form as veritably the same dear friend whom we have not seen for years, appears to leave no interval for doubt that must be solved by at least a crude kind of syllogism before we can be really sure that we know. But in many cases, and probably in the majority of cases, even when they end in the most assured kind of knowledge {sufficient both for subjective conviction and for objective certainty) some [44] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? shadow of doubt is thrown across the path which leads to the final cognitive judgment. When you ask the scientific botanist, "What is this weed, or this flower?" or the scientific entomo- logist, "What is this insect?" he may seem to you to give instantly his reply. But he does not. At the best, he pauses to look for a fraction of a second before uttering the suspended judgment; at the worst, he looks long before he confesses his ignorance or gives a somewhat hesitating reply. Even these facts are enough to suggest, what we shall illustrate and enforce further, that no indi- vidual can be a knower without also being a thinker; and that one's capacity and acquire- ments for the latter form of functioning are sure to be just as individual as for the former. In spite of the very unsatisfactory condition in which we are leaving our analysis of a completed act of knowledge, and our statement of the activ- ities and limiting conditions of all knowledge; and in spite of the imfinished state in which we should finally be obliged to leave the answer to our question. What is it to know? quite enough has already been said to yield some valuable considerations of an intensely practical sort. Plainly, to answer in the best manner one's individual, or personal problem of knowledge, one must cultivate in an individual way the power of prompt and accurate recognition. This power must be especially directed to all that has been learned through past experience, of facts [45] WHAT CAN I KNOW? and events, of the qualities and causes of things, and of the laws of their behavior, as affording the principles that regulate life under the so-called "value conceptions," or "ideas of that which has worth." One must have a wide range of available recognitions, so to say. Then one must make use of these recognitions to increase the store of one's knowledge, in the interests of a worthier life. But one must do all this in an individual way. No man can take over another's store of knowledge. No two men can know things or events, or represent to themselves laws and principles, in precisely the same way. But there are certain common rules which must pre- vail in every man's self -development; though for each man in a different way. Have we not al- ready shown that every knower is a child of the race; but also that every knower is an individual with an inheritance, an environment, and a habit of seizing or letting slip opportunity, — all of which are characteristically his own? Now as to the retentive part of fitness for use- ful recognition, one can not enter and keep things in the storehouse of the mind as one stores half- used furniture in the attic or fresh vegetables in the cellar. The quicker these material things are put away and the more securely the doors are locked, the better stored they are. But with the things of the mind, the case is not so. The oftener and more closely we attend to them, the oftener we take them out for inspection and for [46] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? cleaning and for use, the better are the things of the nund stored away. Storing them involves the utmost possible use and testing and improve- ment by use: to keep them we must make them ever more fully our own, but not as though under lock and key. Reminiscence, and the voluntary recall which enlists and often engrosses, and which some- times so puzzles and baflles our powers of think- ing, is a necessary part of that kind of memory which makes the faculty of recognition possible. But reminiscence too, is a matter of individual culture; each individual has a somewhat essen- tially different way of recollecting things. For each individual has more or less control over his trains of associated ideas, and over the processes of thinking by which he modifies and corrects these ideas. That the imaging faculty of different persons varies greatly in its natural character and acquired facility, is one of the most familiar and well established of psychological truths. Some are good visualizers, like those artists who are able by an act of imagination to seat their subject in the chair before them and paint his portrait from the mental picture. Others hear the tunes they recall, humming themselves softly to the inner ear. Still others have scarcely any vivid visual or acoustic reminiscences at all. With the great majority, if not with absolutely every- body, more or less of an inaudible "talking to one's self" accompanies most acts of reminis- [47] WHAT CAN I KNOW? cence. The act of reminiscence is therefore mixed up with the kind of language which one is able to use, or somewhat habitually uses. The man not familiar with the language of science, or with certain of the higher forms of sesthetical or religious experience, can not "reminisce" in terms of such language. I was myself once told by the celebrated "ascetic Rajah of Benares," when I asked him how personal consciousness without a measure of self-consciousness could be retained in Nirvana, that I could not understand the matter, because I did not speak Sanscrit! From all these and many other similar considera- tions we draw the conclusion that the solution of the problem. What is it for me to know.!* will depend in large measure on the discovery by myself of what my aptitudes are, and on the cultivation of intelligent and steady habits of committing to memory what I learn, of thought- ful and frequent recollection, and of accurate and vivid imagination; but above all, upon the char- acter and extent of the use made of my particular fund of knowledge for the faithful discharge of the practical affairs of the daily life. In saying this last truth we come upon a whole set of considerations which enter into the problem of knowledge, in both a widely general and also a very closely-fitting pecuUar and personal way, but to which far too little attention has been given by either the philosophers of the chair or the exhorters to a more practical philosophy of [48] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? life. These considerations have to do with the supremely important, the quite decisive r6le, which the emotions and sentiments play in all problems of knowledge. The conception of the knower, raised to the ideal terms of the highest potency, is not after the type of Browning's Empedocles, "A living man no more; Nothing but a devouring flame of thought, but a naked, eternally restless mind." Omniscience is not such a "naked mind" as that. The feeUngs, higher and lower, are always powerfully influenc- ing knowledge. Some of them are essential constituents of every act of knowledge. In the case of every attempt to acquire knowledge, and every attempt to recall and use and increase the stores of knowledge, it is distinctly as important that one should feel right as it is that one should think correctly. Indeed without feeling right one cannot think correctly. We are sometimes warned — and this with the best intent — against prejudgment when asked to form a sound new judgment respecting any alleged fact, or conventional practice, or debat- able law or principle. But we cannot judge anything without prejudgments; these prejudg- ments constitute our stock of knowledge, and form standards to which we naturally expect all new objects, to a recognizable extent, to conform. All moralists agree, however, to the maxim that these prejudgments must not be allowed to degenerate into unconquerable prejudices. But [49] WHAT CAN I KNOW? here again, our inquiries are thrown into con- fusion; for what one man considers only fair judgment held with honest conviction, another considers unreasonable and bigoted prejudice. And nothing is more injurious to science than the prejudices of its devotees against — and quite as often, in favor of — new discoveries, new laws, new hypotheses. In politics, partisanship is the cause of more backsets and blunders than is either irremovable ignorance or open corrup- tion. While the arch-enemy of moral and re- ligious progress, the very "devil to pay" in almost all social and ecclesiastical quarrels, is the spirit of bigotry. But in none of the fields of knowledge just mentioned can any fixed rules be given to determine for every man what of his prejudgments may reasonably stand self-accused of being un- scientific, partisan, or bigoted. Every man who wishes to solve wisely for himself the question, What can I know? and who understands how essentially his emotions condition for every knower the answer to the question. What is it to know? will, however, be on the alert to suspect himself as taking a prejudiced attitude toward all alleged new truths which do not fit in with his outfit of prejudgments. Instead, however, of summarily flinging overboard these prejudg- ments in the effort to make himself a "naked mind," or, indeed, dismissing any one of them which belongs either to the top or the bottom of his store of knowledge, he will, if it seems worth [50] WHAT IS IT TO KNOW? while and he can spare the time, examine anew the reasons which led him to the concluding of them. The oftener and more thoroughly and candidly he does this, the more will he make of himself a knower with a fair and open mind. Even so, the question. What can I know? will remain a very precious and particular one. I have said that there are certain emotions and sentiments which are essential elements in all knowledge. In a way, this may be said of all the emotions themselves. No one can know what it is to be angry or envious or jealous, or to be kindly and cheerful, to long, to love, to hate, to aspire, and even less to have the senti- ments which go with the ideas of value in the spheres of art, morality and religion, without himself having had a hving experience of those very same emotions. It is almost equally obvious that without the feelings of curiosity, interest, and desire for vari- ous kinds of good, the seeds of knowledge, if they could be planted in human soil, would suffer only a stimted growth or a speedy decay. In the passage already referred to, Kant spoke of conviction and certainty as essential elements of our knowledge. But these are sentiments, and yet they form in large measure the final tests and guaranties of all human knowledge. These feel- ings, therefore, require from us, as indispensable to any semblance of an answer to our problem, some special treatment. [51] WHAT CAN I KNOW? One truth we are already beginning to see; it has been more and more clearly apparent with every forward step in the discussion. KnowU edge is a matter of the entire man. All the capaci- ties and faculties, all the opportunities, whether diligently improved or sadly missed, enter into its very warp and woof. I can know, according to the standard of what I am as a knower; and the real knower is the whole Self, not as a "naked mind" but as a living soul. [52] CHAPTER III ON THINKING ONE'S WAY THROUOH A SUBJECT "°°T^HAT one cannot acquire knowledge, at least in any extensive and elaborate way, without "Doing a bit of thinking," is the popular understanding. This popular under- standing is amply confirmed by all the various branches of psychological science. To think it out for one's self, or to study the thoughts of others, is necessary for the mastery of any com- phcated matter, whether it concerns some dis- puted fact of observation, some doubtful event, some attempt at classification, some law of nature, or principle of social or private morality. In business and in politics, as well as in science or in theology, thinking must lead up to sound knowledge, and to the use of such knowledge in the conduct of life. So intimate and true is this relation between thinking and knowing, that the two words are not infrequently employed as though they might be interchanged to represent essentially the same processes. We do not indeed customarily use the term "thought" for the act of immediate [53] WHAT CAN I KNOW? recognition through the senses. If one is asked to judge a thing with the name and character of which one is perfectly familiar, one says: "I know that thing, that it is properly so named, and at least in some good degree what it is." In general, when giving satisfactory attention to the object in the full light of day, men do not express their mental attitude toward it by affirm- ing, "I think it is this or that," but the rather, "It is this or that." Let, however, the least doubt arise in the mind, either of the person who makes the affirmation or of any of those to whom the affirmation is made, and the significant question follows: "Do you really think so.''" or, "Why do you think so?" These questions imply that more of thinking should now enter into the attempt at recognition; and that the claim to success in recognition must be confirmed by placing it on a ground of reason valid for others as well as for the one who makes the affirmation. To recur again to the language of Kant: The "subjective sufficiency" which has served for the knower's own conviction, requires still to be transformed into the "objective sufficiency," or certainty, re- quired for a finished act of knowing. It is in view of these very true and useful con- siderations, which are more or less obscurely felt by everybody but require the analysis of the skilled psychologist in order to bring out their deeper meaning, that our most ordinary language about the acquisition, possession and use of knowl- [54] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY edge, deserves to be interpreted. "Think it over, and when you have made up your mind, let me know." "What do you think this is?" and "What does he think about that.?" belong to the same order of well-founded inferences as embodied in the language of daily life. In fine, it is only the man who thinks and thinks to some good pur- pose, that can get and hold and employ to serve his ends, any considerable store of knowledge. We have already seen that some previous thinking must have been employed upon the so- called data of sense-impressions, in order to make possible that recognition in which so largely the seemingly most immediate acts of knowledge through the senses consist. In what is called a sense-perception, as distiagxiished from a tangled mass of sensaiion-complexes, selective attention, discrimination, association of mental images, and other of the more primary intellectual processes have already taken place. Without some of this rudimentary form of thinking, the new-born baby of the human species could never learn to know either things or its own Self, as all adult and mentally soimd human beings do. It is not, however, of that primary thinking which is necessary, so to say, to the formation of an object recognizable by the mind, but, the rather, of thinking one's way through, or at least well into, a subject that we propose to speak in the present connection. The kind of intel- lectual performance, which manufactures a store [55] WHAT CAN I KNOW? of more varied and accurate knowledge by the processes of thought, has, on account of its very nature, been called by some psychologists "the Elaborative Faculty." Such is the term adopted in the somewhat pompous and over-refined divisions of "cognitive faculties" by Sir William Hamilton. "This," says he, "is Thought, strictly so called; it corresponds to the Siavota of the Greek, to the Discursus of the Latin, to the Verstand of the German philosophy; and its laws are the object of logic." So stiff and seclusive a conception of thought as a fifth kind of the class called cogni- tive faculties, and its subjection, which, for a long time, was little better than an onerous and deceptive slavery to the laws of formal logic, has ceased to commend itself to modern psychol- ogy. But the term "elaborative," as applied to this sort of thinking, is not altogether inappro- priate, — especially when the creation of thoughts by the "freeing" of the mental images from their concrete and individual features, and the rela- tions of thought to language, are discerned and taken into the account. The nature of the general concept, and its dependence on concrete mental images, was hotly debated by the schoolmen of the Middle Ages. The contentions of these schools were made matters of grave theological importance. Rival schoolmen were prone to accuse their opponents on this philosophical point of being guilty of destructive, if not deadly, heresy. The nature [56] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY of the general notion, and whether there is any such thing in mental experience, is full of mooted questions and unsettled controversies, even down to the present hour. But this debate does not so affect the importance of our question. What is it to know? in its relation to the main problem of the individual thinker. What can I know? as to obscure or diminish his interest in it. What- ever psychological analysis may prove or disprove as to the elements entering into thought, it still remains true for the individual knower that, if he either can not or will not learn to think, he will never acquire any worthy store of accurate and useful knowledge. Indeed, we might at once go much further than this: the thoughtless man cannot be a good workman in any sphere, cannot be a socially or morally worthy man. And he certainly can never lay for himself any grounds for a reasonable and tenable faith respecting the great truths of God, freedom, and immortality. The thing of first importance to notice when considering how we shall undertake, and how proceed, to think our way through a subject is this: Thinking, if it is going to contribute either to the confirmation or the correction or the increase of our knowledge, must come to its con- clusion in some form of a judgment. It is only as we judge that we can be said to know anything. It is this; it is not that; It was thus; it was not so; It belongs to this class; it does not belong to that class; Its causes are these; its causes are [57] WHAT CAN I KNOW? not those; This, and not that, is the law which governs in such cases as the one under discussion, etc. These and such mental attitudes as these, we will call "knowledge-judgments." As long as the thinker has not arrived at some kind of a judgment — it may even be, "I am not sure, but I think so," — he has made no real advance in the direction of knowledge. The Hon. E. J. Phelps once told the writer the story of how his professor, when he had made two different attempts to answer a question of law, had met him at the end of each with the quiet remark, "That is not correct"; and how, when he had been goaded to the confession, "I do not know," the professor remarked just as quietly, "That is correct." In this case, as in innumera- ble other cases, I do not know, is the only way to tell the truth of what we do know. But, "I do not know," is a judgment. We are of the opinion, based not only on psy- chological science but also on facts of common observation, that much confusion of thinking and no little practical mischief have been caused by those who, like the late Professor James, in ex- pounding their theories of the nature and meaning of knowledge, have dwelt so exclusively on the truth and the falsity of "ideas." But ideas, as such, can neither be true nor false; to apply these terms to them is to commit, in the interests of popular clearness and charm, a harmful scientific blunder. Only judgments are either true or false. [58] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY And this is true of all judgments, — namely, that they are of necessity, either true or false, or partly true and partly false, — whether they are judgments aflfirming relations of ideas or relations of real things. Let us take, for an example, the idea of that mythical animal which has so often served to illustrate the distinction between sub- jectivity and objectivity in forming conceptions, the idea, namely, of a Centaur. As gained from the reading of Greek mythology and from consult- ing the dictionary which I trust, my idea of a centaur is: "A fabled monster, having the head, arms, and body of a man from the waist up, and the body and legs of a horse." Now, is this idea of a centamr false or true? As an idea, pure and simple, it is neither the one nor the other. The instant I attach by an act of thinking any form of a judgment to it, the idea becomes either true or false; but then it loses its characteristic of being merely an idea. Not having the historically correct idea of a centaur, I might before consult- ing a dictionary, have conceived of this fabled monster as just half -man and half -horse in the re- verse direction (upper part horse, lower part man). In this case, I should have uttered a true judgment, if I had simply said, that is my idea of a centaur; but if I had meant: Such was the conception in the mythology of ancient Greece, I should have uttered a false judgment. The judgment, which would have been both sub- jectively and objectively sufficient, would have [59] WHAT CAN I KNOW? been the one forced from the reluctant law- student by the persistent professor, — simply I do not know. It follows, then, that only such thinking as leads to sound judgment contributes to the refine- ment and the increase of any man's store of knowledge. But processes of thought which end in the conclusion, I do not know, or Such, whatever may be the truth, is my idea of the matter, fall far short of the requirements which are put upon us by the demands of our rational faculties and by the stern exigencies of the prac- tical life. Both society and conscience agree in urging the obligations of knowledge. About a great variety of things they both exhort the individual thinker: "If you do not now know, it is high time that you did know; Go to work and learn, before the penalties of ignorance fall on you in the form of some final disgrace or over- whelming disaster." Men who are continually proclaiming "my idea" of this or that, unless one pardons them as unskilled in the use of English, or as thoughtless followers of a false psychology, are apt to be heard with contempt. It takes no large measure of reflection to make clear the reason for the prevalent contemptuous attitude toward a cowardly subjectivism; and the reason reveals one of the profoundest of all philosophical truths. If one may for once em- ploy the technical language of philosophy, it is on this truth that the foundations of both episte- [60] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY mology and of metaphysics are solidly laid. No amount of scepticism, and no resort to seductive rhetoric in the use of misleading figures of speech, can shake these foundations. Simply stated, the truth is this : All human science, all human faiths, all human conduct, assume, expand, confirm, the correlation between knowledge and reality. It is not simply or chiefly our own ideas or mental attitudes, which we wish to know, and do our thinking in order to know; it is real things, their qualities and relations, actual events, their causes and laws, moral principles and religious faiths that are in fact available for the better conduct of actual relations to other men and to the world at large. Whether we are through and through deceived in all this, and how far an absolutely sceptical and agnostic attitude toward all human knowledge can maintain, or even state, itself without falling into pieces through internal con- tradictions, — these problems do not concern us at the present time. But to talk about knowledge as only o/ phenomena, or as having for its object only "appearances," and to set over against the phenomena an impenetrable world of so-called "noumena," or of realities that have no con- ceivable appearances, is to introduce hopeless confusion into the conception of knowledge by an absurd use of language in the very description of the act of knowledge. The practical outcome thus far, of our answer to the question. What is it to know? in respect of [61] WHAT CAN I KNOW? the thinking which is necessary to knowledge, is the maxim that one must be continually looking after one's judgments. To have one's mind stored with judgments that correspond to the reality of things material, and of persons, and of both in their actual relations (knowledge-judg- ments), is what every individual who aspires to be a knower must achieve as a thinker. To be a knowing man, one must be habitually and con- sistently a thoughtful man. It is customary, especially in these days when the effort has become so violent, and even in not a few cases, so unscrupulous, to free all minds from what are rhetorically called "the trammels of the past," and when the estimate is so extreme which is put upon any one who can, by using unfamiliar language, deceive those ignorant of his- tory into rendering him praise for his originality, to ask every individual thinker "to do his own thinking." Every babe is encouraged to think for himself. Now, in some sort, the very con- ception of one individual doing another indi- vidual's thinking for him, is a plain absurdity. Thinking is essentially, and must always remain, a form of mental activity which can be performed only by the thinker himself. What really takes place in the case of those who do not think for themselves is that they take the judgments of others — the conventional judgments or the pri- vate judgments of those whom they elect to trust. — without really making them their own by pro- [62] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY cesses of thought. That is to say, they do not really think, at least so far as to arrive at the only terminus of thinking which contributes to the increase of knowledge; and this is a judgment concerning the real and the actual. But those who make a great show of thinking out things for themselves, and are very suspicious about taking for true the judgments of anybody else, are, as a rule, as little qualified for concluding a sound judgment as are those who refuse to think at all. There is not one in ten of the truths which we must know, in order to have common-sense and to guide aright our daily conduct, at a judgment about which we have arrived, or ever could arrive, by thinking them out for ourselves. Many of these truths, and especially such as are truths of fact, we have had incorporated into our lives, by the steady pressure of environment, or by the process of enforced learning. Indeed, in all learning, as conducted by means of books and oral instruction, when forming our judgments, we properly defer to men who, by prolonged and accurate observations, followed by thinking the data through to the end of well-grounded judg- ment, know the nature and operations of things physical, mental, and social. Only a small pro- portion of the race, or of men in any period of its history, or of any particular community, can possibly think their way through any considerable number of subjects; or even, in these days of the enormously multiform division and subdivision [63] WHAT CAN I KNOW? of subjects, through any one of them so as to arrive at an available list of knowledge-judgments authoritative for all. The vast multiplication of resources of in- formation as to the judgments formed by the men who ought to know, and this extending to the remotest times in the history of the whole race, makes possible a relatively large accumulation of knowledge for the average man. Knowledge and wisdom that were hidden from the most gifted and profound thinkers of the past centuries are on the lips, are more or less lodged in the minds, and given control over the lives, of babes and sucklings, at the present time. But even in the acceptance of these judgments the would-be knower is by no means wholly discharged from the obligation to do much thinking for himself. This obligation grows by an inner and inescapable necessity out of the fact that his answer to the question. What can I know.f* must always remain so much a private and individual affair. All these judgments which, from generation to genera- tion, add to the richness of the world's knowledge are "general judgments"; that is they are applica- ble to classes of things, to conditions most widely prevalent, etc. A "good bit" of thinking is therefore necessary in the majority of cases, in order to form a sound judgment as to the manner and degree to which, just at this moment, and in view of the peculiar conditions of this moment, they are applicable to any one of us. We must [64] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY do some thinking to find this out. And since our grounds of the "apphcation- judgment" can never be absolutely complete or perfectly clear, we must be satisfied with a probable judgment. Whether we call this probable judgment by the name of knowledge, or not, it is the kind of a judgment in reliance upon which our most im- portant daily interests must be staked. There is, however, another and more encourag- ing side to the truth which has just been called to our minds. In the case of many of these judgments which we must take mainly as the result of others' thinking the su,bject through for us, we have certain data, which we may ourselves work up, that are derived from experiences of our own. The value of these personal data will de- pend upon the way in which we have observed them, stored them in the memory, upon our ability to recall them, and especially upon our ability and our willingness to think their meaning through to the conclusion of a sound judgment. But all these personal qualifications for a thought- ful attitude toward the truths embodied in our own experiences are matters of cultivated habit under rules of semi-moral semblance, if not of a perfectly exphcit moral character. In every individual we recognize the important truth that thoughtfulness and sanity of judgment are de- pendently related. How our own thinking enters into the judg- ments which appropriate the knowledge of others, [65] WHAT CAN I KNOW? even when we never could have acquired any con- siderable part of that knowledge by thinking it out for ourselves, may be amply illustrated by matters physical, economic, social, moral and religious. I may, for example, know by thinking over my experience that some other kind of fertilizer than that recommended by the local Agricultural School is best for my garden; that some other diet or kind of medicine than that prescribed by the medical profession is best for my dyspepsia; that the social conventions rec- ognized by my surroundings will not satisfy my conscience; or, that in spite of the general agnostic theology or lack of experience of the community, I have an adequate and satisfying knowledge of my God as my Redeemer. And if any one, having an overweening confidence in the generalizations of the economists, of the prevalent Schools of medicine, of the prevailing views on morals and religion, however fortified by volumes of collected facts, or alleged facts, and of ethical and religious psychology and philosophy, — if any one, I say, with an overweening confidence in these scientific inductions, disputes my claim to knowledge because it is based on thinking over my own experiences, there avails the valid reply that all human knowledge is, of necessity, placed on a constantly variable and perpetually shifting basis of individual experiences. Being thoughtless, whether it be due to lack of the ability or of the habit of thinking, is sure to [66] ON THINE3NG ONE'S WAY result in hasty and ill-formed judgments. The opposite of thinking one's way painstakingly through a subject is to skip as many as possible of the links in the chain of reasoning which would in accordance with the laws of thought lead at the last to a logically established conclusion. Thoroughness, or throughness, in thinking is opposed to jumping at conclusions. We are therefore exhorted not to "jump at conclusions," but to "stop to think" before we conclude; to "take time to make up our minds," that their making up may bear the inspection of that tidy housewife, the so-called logical faculty. But plainly, in many and even perhaps in the great majority of cases, nothing could be more highly unreasonable, in the most practical and useful meaning of that much abused word, than not to jump at our conclusions. If we see a child standing in the way of an automobile or tram-car, we snatch him out of the way; because we have reason to fear that he does not as yet know enough to proceed with the requisite speed to the proper conclusion. If we see the same danger threatening ourselves, we do not stop to think; indeed, stopping to work out a conclusion by a process of thinking which regarded consciously the laws of formal logic, would almost certainly be fatal. We jump to a conclusion, the quicker, the better; and it is a conclusion which promptly executes itself in our psycho-physical jumping apparatus. [67J WHAT CAN I KNOW? Within certain limitations, which cannot easily be fixed under a priori rules, the more a man knows, the more he jumps to conclusions; and the wider is the range of conclusions to which he can jump with the tolerably safe assurance that his jump will land him on the other side of the bog into which ignorance would fall, and upon the solid ground of verifiable knowledge. The pri- mary condition of the knowing and skilful driver of a locomotive or an automobile is just this, that he shall not have to stop to think. His knowledge has become so incorporate in his very being that he instantly arrives at the correct conclusion, no matter how complicated the situation which forms the minor premise for the syllogism he has to solve. His cerebral and nervous-muscular reactions instantly execute the movements that realize the mental attitude to his problem. In- deed, he who solves the personal equation so splendidly, because he knows his business so well, is scarcely aware of any even instantaneous mental attitude other than a mixture of sensations and emotional stirrings. Traces of logical think- ing are hard to discover. It is not only, however, in such practical emer- gencies as those just described, that knowing shows itself at its very best in the ability to jump to conclusions, without any appreciable resort to the so-called elaborative faculty. What we have called recognition, as an essential factor in all knowledge, involves such a process. The more [68] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY a man knows about things, their qualities and changes, or about events, their causes and the laws which control them, the better fitted is he to conclude with an apparent absence of the process of thought, what they are, and how to explain and to use them. This is not because his knowl- edge has made him hasty in judgment or thought- less and unsafe in matters requiring prolonged thinking. It is, the rather, because his previous thinking, on a foundation of varied and careful observations, has so to speak, provided him with a great fund of judgments already made and incorporated (perhaps, we have no better word) into his very being. This fund is his reward for having been observing and thoughtful in the past; it is his store in the savings-bank of the mind. It is not diminished by using it for current expenses; it is more sure to be increased by con- stant use. For no one, no matter how expert in any kind of knowledge, is always infallible when he jumps to his conclusions; nor, for that matter, when he arrives at them by the longest route followed in the effort to think them through to the end. Indeed, as we shall see later, infalli- bility is not the characteristic of any form of human knowledge; nor is it given to any man to think any subject through to the end. But the mistakes which the knower makes in his "jumped" conclusion set him to thinking over the subject in order to find out in just what those mistakes consisted. This new process of thinking breeds [69] WHAT CAN I KNOW? caution, where it is possible to use caution, when the next occasion comes for arriving at a similar conclusion; or, in time, it occasions a more or less decided modification in the character of the conclusion at which the mind habitually and spontaneously arrives. For example, a physician skilled in diagnosis is called to see a patient who is broken out with a rash. If the disease is not suffi- ciently developed, the more knowing the doctor, the more slow he will be in judgment; the more he will wait for further evidence and take time to think the symptoms over. But suppose that the eruption is in small raised dots, either sepa- rate or in crescentric patches, he will immediately conclude that it is a case of measles. But if it is a diflfused scarlet rash, extending over the skin and mucous membrane of the throat, he will be equally prompt to conclude a case of scarlatina. While a pustular eruption following the course of a nerve will be at once pronounced a case of herpes zoster. Jumping at conclusions, as a means not only of expressing but of extending knowledge, is not by any means confined to such cases of ordinary experience as have thus far been employed to illustrate the benefits it confers. In fact, almost all the happiest conclusions in business, inven- tion, state-craft, and science, have been "jumped into," in the first instance. It is of the very nature of a discovery to come in this way, — especially if the discovery belong to the invisible and spirit- [70] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY ual realm of natxiral law or World-order, or of moral and religious principles. It is to the men of vision — as we say impressively, comparing this seemingly immediate seizure of truth with the recognition of the eye when it faces a familiar object — that this kind of new knowledge comes. Thus they are often said to "intuit" it. In its highest form this way of knowing things is not infrequently considered as the supreme mark of genius. As said Professor C. C. Everett: "Genius works less by a process of conscious reasoning than by a flash of intuition, and less by abstract conception than by a prophetic beholding of results." Intuitive knowledge, as a way of knowing that could claim absolution from all the laws of thinking and from the obligation to think one's way as far as possible through a subject before arriving at the knowledge-judgment, was claimed for a sort of rational face-to-face presenta- tion of God, by St. Anselm; for the immediate cognition of the Absolute as a positive conception, by Fichte and Schelling; and the same way of knowing has been made by the Mystics of all ages the sufficient ground and proof of all manner of unverifiable claims to knowledge, and even as an excuse for holding absurd and self-contradictory conceptions. At the present time in philosophical circles. Professor Bergson and others are busy at the work of discrediting the intellect and its duty of clear thinking, to which is given the pseudonym of "Rationalism," in the interests of what they [71 J WHAT CAN I KNOW? are pleased to call the faculty or act of "Intui- tion." Certain biologists, reviving in another form the extremes of Schopenhauer, who deliber- ately aimed to subordinate intellect to blind unconscious Will, are diligently trying to show how superior is what they call "instinct," even in its lowest manifestation as an almost purely unconscious psycho-physical affair, to the con- clusions which human minds reach by deliberate and elaborate processes of reasoning. The suflScient reply to all devices for dispensing with the obligation to do as much as "in one lies," of the work of the intellect in its effort to arrive at knowledge, and so to place one's convictions as to what is true, or one's guesses as to what may he true, on grounds of objective certainty, is to be found in the facts of psychology. First: Intui- tion, of itself so to say (and much less instinct), never amounts to knowledge; and, second: There is no such mental process or attitude as intuition which does not of necessity involve all the other processes of the intellect as well. Intuitions of truth do not arise in minds that have made no preparation for them by repeated efforts to think their way through the subject with which both the thought and the intuition, so-called, are concerned. Such intuitions, when they have arisen above the horizon of the conscious mind, no matter how clarifying and welcome and re- lieving of painful doubt they may appear to be, do not as yet constitute knowledge. They must [72] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY be thrown into the crucible of thought and tested there. And if they concern large and new claims to knowledge, they must be able to endure the heat of argument, the thrice-heated fires of con- troversy. In one's study, or in one's bedchamber, one may recline in unreflecting delight, or even bow down in worship, before one's intuitions; but he who sends out his intuitions with the claim to be accepted as facts or truths knowable by others, is an intellectual coward, if he calls upon himself or others to accept them without being subjected to the process of a thorough testing by the intellects of his fellow men. To separate in one's philosophical theory intuition from intellect, and to subordinate the whole to the part, is to be guilty of a most obvious, but serious, psychological fallacy. Flashes of intuition, resulting in the leap to new conclusions concerning the truth of things, are in all departments of truth, necessary adjuncts to the progress in knowledge of the individual and of the race. But they are the fruits of previous efiForts to think through a subject, and they must themselves be subjected to the tests of further thinking, before they can be garnered into the storehouse of knowledge. And now the question arises. How shall one think one's self into and through any subject, when the need of an enlarged and corrected judgment is either demonstrated by experience or suggested by some form of so-called intuition? The old- fashioned psychology gave an easy answer to this [73] WHAT CAN I KNOW? forever difficult and complicated question. It bade us follow the "laws of thought." To think one's way toward, or clear up to, a valid knowl- edge-judgment, one must pursue the correct path; and this correct path was defined by the established principles of formal logic. "WeYL-estab- lished these principles certainly appeared to be; for had they not maintained themselves unaltered and almost uncontested from the days of Aristotle down to within a century of the present time.'' When the further, more definite question was asked. What precisely are these inexorable laws of all correct thinking? the answer was found in the well-known "Principles of Identity and Difference," and of "Sufficient Reason," and in the logically valid forms of the Syllogism. Be logical in your tliinking was then the advice which must be followed by every thinker who is ambi- tious to think his way to the position of a knower. Only thus could he say; "I know this judgment of mine to be true (to be 'sufficient objectively') because it corresponds to the truth of things." But there are objections, theoretical and prac- tical, to the utility of the laws of thought as they were customarily proclaimed in treatises on Formal Logic. In the first place, these laws bore little or no resemblance to the actual processes employed by living and active human minds, whether in the discovery or in the testing of knowl- edge. And even if they did represent certain purely formal ways of the mind's arriving at [74] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY the goal of knowledge, they themselves required in their abstract form the guarantee of a good thinker, in order to make them usable for solv- ing the peculiarities of that particular thinker's individual case. It may even be shown that, when taken in their strictest form and interpreted as infallible guides to knowledge, they involve all the fallacies which they are recommended to avoid. In a word, the human mind does not in fact think as the formulas of Logic would have us believe that it does; and even if humanity in the abstract did so think, the individual thinker would need to know all the lessons they are designed to teach, and much more, both as to the constitution of the real World and as to the working of his own mind, before he could make these forms of much use in his own case. The formulas are indeed dry shells, and no living organism ever wriggled out of them into the clear light of life's work-a-days. We are well aware that such fearful heresy as has just been uttered will greatly stir the teachers and writers of treatises on Formal Logic. But we may illustrate our contention without attempt- ing to prove it. What is the real truth, concealed and smothered rather than revealed, in the logical formula for Identity? This formula is "A is A" or A^A, and the reverse is the principle of Diflference: A is not non-A. If then we wish to think to the end of knowledge, to the goal of a judgment that [75] WHAT CAN I KNOW? corresponds to Reality, the conceptions which we use in our thinking must remain self-same. But no object of human knowledge, and no conception of any human mind, that is supposed correctly to represent an object of knowledge, ever for so much as a single instant remains identical with itself, self-same in the strict meaning of the word. The very existence of everything, non-living as well as living, material as truly as psychical, con- sists in perpetual change. At no two instants of their existence, whether we occupy the stand- point of the observer or the standpoint of the nature of the thing, are physical objects the self-same. The essential nature of events is that they are series of changes in the appear- ances and relations of things. The formulas which we call laws are designed to express in general terms the order customarily observed by things in their changes of quality and quantity, and of causal and other relations to one another. The whole World as known to man is an infinitely intricate network of intercrossed and ceaseless changes. Nothing is identical with itself. In his effort to give an indisputably sure and immutable foundation to his own philosophy, the great thinker Fichte took his point of starting from the proposition: "The Ego posits itself" and it does this trick of positing in terms of the identical proposition: Ego = Ego, or I am I; and over against itself it posits another as non- Ego, as not-I. Whatever we may think of this [76] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY attempt to tell us something about the nature and procedure of the Absolute Ego, — a matter which has little bearing on our present problem, — we are compelled to say that of all beings with which we have any acquaintance, or any hope of acquain- tance in the future, the human Self is least entitled to claim any such identity as that implied in this formula of logic. The very essence of the Self is to be alive, to be ceaselessly changing, never at any two instants of its existence, to remain precisely the self-same. Indeed, no man can say to himself, and be aware of what he is saying, the simple sentence, "I am," without being a changed man before he gets to the end of this simple sentence. And the profundity of the change will depend upon the amount of thought he puts into the sentence. This change may amount to a mental revolution, to the birth of a transformed personality, as indeed, it did in the case of Jean Paul Richter. "Never shall I forget," says this man "of a pure and sensitive spirit," "the phe- nomenon ia myself, ];iever tUl now recited, when I stood by the birth of my own self-consciousness, the place and time of which are distinct in my memory. On a certain forenoon I stood, a very young child, within the house door, and was looking out towards the wood-pile, as, in an in- stant, the inner revelation, 'I am I,' like lightning from heaven, flashed, and stood brightly before me; in that moment had I seen myself as I, for the first time and forever!" And yet this so- [77] WHAT CAN I KNOW? called self-consciousness is the ground of the principle of Identity. Not more tenable or useful is the principle of Sufficient Reason, in the form in which it is stated for us in formal logic. Some reason or other we may indeed be asked to give as to why, in mooted or doubted judgments, we espouse one side rather than another. But not all the causes which contribute to the nature and changes of any simplest thing, or to the production of the seem- ingly least intricate event, can ever be known to human minds. The simplest thing really is much more than can be observed, or thought, or even dreamed. The commonest event has its origins deep down in the Universal Being, and the history of its occurring involves the history of the World at large. If by sufficient reason we mean the complete account of the causal influences, physical and spiritual, the forces that have produced, the occasions that have combined, the elements that have composed, the ends that have been served; who will undertake to answer any problem of knowledge with a quite sufficient reason? But if we mean sufficient to produce conviction in our own minds, the answer to the question, What can I know? is largely a private aflfair. And if we mean sufficient to impress others with the certainty of the judgment, — taking into account the great differences in opinion and points of view on every truth corroborated beyond doubt by universal experience, — even then the answer [78] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY to the question, What is a suflBcient reason? is almost equally equivocal. If now we examine in the same way the verity and the usefulness of the different forms of the Syllogism, and the rules which they prescribe for logical thinking, we are not greatly relieved of our perplexity and tendency to in- vulnerable scepticism about the fallibility of all kinds and degrees of human knowledge. As has often enough been pointed out, the stock example of the surest form of deductive reasoning itself involves an ineradicable fallacy. "All men are mortal; John is a man; therefore John is himself mortal." But, how do we know that all men are mortal, imless we know that John, too, is a man and mortal? And if we know this about John in particular, why do we need to refer our knowledge to a still doubtful major premise? It is customary in these days of confidence in the certainties of science to help our lame syllogisms to walk on all fours by dis- coursing about the inevitable working of natural forces and the unexceptional reign of natural laws. But the more we know about science, the more we know about its own natural fallibility. Experience has taught us that most human or- ganisms — perhaps all we have ever examined — appear to have what we call "the seeds of death in them"; and that as a matter of fact, they have died. John is to all appearances like all the rest of us; we cannot avoid thinking that he, too, will [79] WHAT CAN I KNOW? end his bodily existence in the same way. We think it with such conviction, and on grounds of evidence which produce the same certainty attach- ing to the judgment in other minds (in the general public and especially in the minds of men who know most about the constitution and probable destiny of every. animal body), that we are sure we have reached a knowledge-judgment. Are we then to believe that there is no use in trying to think one's way through a subject, and that all judgments about affairs practical and matters scientific and speculative, are to be re- garded as alike fallible, and so not worthy of the claim to constitute quite trustworthy elements in the structure of human assured knowledge? By no means so. Two truths, which will in due time be more fully established, must be granted as affecting the answer to the question. What is it to know by the way of logical thinking? Logical think- ing can never render knowledge infallible; much thinking can never render knowledge complete. All knowledge-judgments that are arrived at by thought are only approximately accurate, and are endowed with only a greater or less, but never with a perfect, "objective certainty." And there is no end to the growth of knowledge by thinking. For every thing and every soul is more than we can know or even think it to be; every event has more to both its causes and its effects than can be traced by thought; every law and prin- [80] ON THINKING ONE'S WAY ciple is more profound and extensively applicable than the depths which the intellect of man can sound by observation or by logic. , But every man may attain knowledge and growth in knowledge, corresponding in some good degree to the range and the accuracy of his thinking. If he thinks according to the principles of Identity and Difference, he will discover as far as possible by observation, inquiry of others, and reflection, what is the customary order of changes in which the true nature, as known by us, of each thing, and the true explanation of each event, essentially consists. He will also be dis- criminating; and where this "customary order" is departed from, he will ascribe the departure to some hitherto undiscovered quality of the thing,, or element in the total cause; or else he will assign its source to some different thing or some different order of events. His reasons for his judgments he will continually strive to make in- creasingly "sufficient"; but he will remember that different judgments, even when they are held as knowledge-judgments, must have dif- ferent degrees both of the conviction and the cer- tainty attached to them, if they are to be held in accordance with our experience of actual events and of real things. And in thinking his way to these more sufficiently reasoned judgments, he will be alert to seize every new opportunity for clearer evidence, in whatever way it comes to him, or in which he by diligence may gather it; [81] WHAT CAN I KNOW? he will test all the suggestions arising in his own mind or proffered to him by others; and he will strive for consistency in the arrangement of his thoughts and for harmony in his conclusions along the different lines of his thinking. But above all will he choose to free his thinking from prejudice, from self-deceit, and from rhetorical claptrap and chicanery. In other words, he will per- sistently aim to be a moral man in his thinking, — sincere, patient, humble, apt to think, not only of himself but also of all things, "righteously, soberly, and as he ought to think." [82] CHAPTER IV ON BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW W ^^^ ^HERE thinking, or believing, or opin- ing, or trowing, or dubitating, passes over into knowledge, the most distinc- tive feature of the change in mental attitude is an increase in the assurance with which the judg- ment is pronounced. We were in doubt; we now feel sure. Not long ago, we only conjectured or guessed at the truth; at best we were only partially convicted of the real value of our impressions; but this new evidence, or new point of view, or sudden flash of insight, has thrown light on our problem, and for the present we are satisfied that we have the problem solved in accordance with the facts. We therefore settle our minds down on the basis of a knowledge-judgment. As conscientious persons in the making of all such judgments, we formerly hesitated either confidently ,to aflSrm or confidently to deny. We now aflSrm or deny with a diminished degree of hesitancy; or, perhaps with a total absence of the feeling of hesitancy. Such statements as those just made are con- firmed and consecrated both by the popular [83] WHAT CAN I KNOW? language and by the psychological analysis of the act of knowledge. "Are you perfectly sure?" is the question to which all men want an affirma- tive answer before they resign themselves to the judgment of the expert in some particular field of knowledge, or of the proffered guide in the conduct of life. Whether it be an investment of money, a diagnosis of disease, advice for the use of the agriculturist or the manufacturer, a principle of morals or a doctrine of religion, at least a tolerable amount of conviction is re- quired as a guaranty of its certainty. Psycholo- gists have distinguished a so-called "Sentiment of Truth," or more correctly styled, a "Feeling or Sentiment of Conviction," as an essential factor in every form and degree of knowledge. "To know is to be certain that something is," says one of our older writers (Porter) on psychology; and, we might add, to be at least to some extent certain, what that something in particular is. Here again we may refer to the Kantian distinc- tion between the conviction which is the test of subjective sufficiency and the certainty which is based upon objective sufficiency. When we consider the facts of real life, how- ever, it at once becomes obvious that being sure of what we know and knowing truly are two widely different things. Indeed, we may say that the amount of assurance with which any individual affirms any particular claim to knowl- edge is no proof whatever of the validity of his [84 J BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW claim. In saying this we need not appeal to those claims which are made with some self- interested or dishonest motive in view. We know that the most dangerous scoundrels or untrustworthy fools are, somewhat regularly, those who try to arouse confidence in others by working themselves up into a passionate assurance of the truthfulness of their claims to knowledge. Even with the most sincere and guileless persons, assurance of knowledge is in itself little or no guaranty of the actuality of knowledge. The emotion of assurance, whether it attach itself to some form of belief, or to some one of those mental attitudes which we desire to dis- tinguish from mere belief by calling them knowl- edge, when considered as a form of reaction characteristic of the individual, is an aflFair largely of temperament. Some persons are nat- urally careless and some naturally cautious about forming knowledge- judgments. Both the careless in their judgments and the cautious in their judg- ments may be more or less sure of the truth of their respective conclusions when formed as the residt of differences in temperamental reactions. We might, indeed make a brave show of dis- tinguishing foiu" classes of minds as divided by the character of their feeling or sentiment of intellectual conviction. Thus we should have (1) the quick and sure, (2) the quick and still doubtful or not quite sure, (3) the slow and sure, and (4) the slow but never quite sure. So many different [85] WHAT CAN I KNOW? ways are there for the making up of one's mind and of settling it in a position where it can be cemented firmly with the feeling of certainty. The result of this is, as Montaigne long ago pointed out: "Every opinion is strong enough to have had its martyrs." The vagaries con- cerning "the whole distribution of all the regions of the great invisible," the "things which Jesus had not told his disciples," are asserted in terms of knowledge by the writer of that curious early Christian treatise called Pistis Sophia (or Faith that is Knowledge), as indeed the vagaries of the late Mrs. Eddy are propounded in modern Christian Science literature, with all the assur- ance which belongs to the underlying principles of the solar system or the inductions of modern biological evolution. At the present day, even in scientific circles, there are probably more doubtful aflfirmations or denials, made with the full assurance which properly belongs to knowl- edge, than there are proved truths, whether of fact or law or ultimate principles. On the other hand, there are temperamental doubters, minds that are forever hesitating over the positions which they shall take, not only with reference to judgments still accompanied by a notable measure of legitimate distrust, but even concerning the well-nigh universally accepted con- clusions of expert students and the popular opin- ion. And what is further significant with these habitual doubters is the fact that not infrequently [86] BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW they divide themselves into sub-classes in de- pendence, not so much upon the amount of evi- dence looking toward the objective truthfulness of any particular theory or opinion, as upon the nature of the subject with which the theory or opinion has to do. There are men who are so credulous with regard to some cherished doctrine of a theological character, or scheme for moral and social reform, that the plainest evidence of a scientific character, when it bears in the direction of correcting their credulity, has little influence upon the tenacity and assurance of their faith. But perhaps there are as many "scientists" who reject evidence for those truths of morals and religion which have been established by the highest products of the spiritual evolution of the race, that is far in excess of any evidence they can possibly present for their own most cherished views as to the facts and the course of the world's physical and biological evolution. For such minds it is much easier to beUeve that the confused and internally contradictory conception of Ether cor- responds to the substantial Reality and the creative Force, which the human intellect de- mands to satisfy its need for a solid Ground in which to place its account of all particular things and all events, than to believe in an immanent and ceaselessly creative Spirit, a Personal Absolute, whom "faith calls God." All these kinds of temperament may be so habitually indulged, or so unfortunately worked [87] WHAT CAN I KNOW? upon by their environment, as to result in ex- tremes of abnormal intellectual development, or even of insanity. Our asylums are full of the victims of such abnormal development. Among their inmates are those who are holding the wildest delusions, the most absurd and grotesque hallu- cinations, with all the tenacity and assurance which the human mind can give to the most approved knowledge-judgments. That some of their bodily organism has turned to glass or is full of demoniac spirits, that they are some great one risen from the dead or descended from heaven, that they are habitually in communion with distant or departed friends, that they are kings or emperors or gods in the flesh, — all these things they know and know that they know, without a shadow of doubt or the slightest possi- bility of successful contradiction. The madder they get, the surer they are. The only way to restore their mental sanity and make them again capable of genuine knowledge in these particular judgments, involves the destruction of their diseased confidence in the validity of the same judgments. But side by side with these unfortunates, in the next cell or the adjoining corridor, are other victims of abnormal or even hopelessly insane doubt. In its simplest form this abnormal con- dition is described (see Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions, p. 375) as "a chronic disease of the mind characterized by constant uneasiness." [88] BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW Some cases "do not pass beyond the region of every day trivialities, as the man who will return twenty times to see whether he has really locked his door." To others, who have the diseased mind of the doubter in its graver forms, there has come "the complete loss of all notion and feeling of reality." By no means all the most melan- choly and hopeless cases are confined to doubters on such subjects as those about which healthy minds would hesitate to claim the possibility of obtaining the full assurance of the tested "knowl- edge-judgment"; such as one's own salvation, or the recovery from a severe illness, when prom- ised by a court of attending physicians. As certain classes instanced above, both of abnormal assurance and of abnormal doubt, plainly show, the presence or absence of rational conviction concerns truths for the establishment of which the observer ordinarily appeals to the individual himself as the source of most accurate knowledge. But temperamental tendencies to over-confi- dence or to excessive caution, and the influence of prejudice on the side of affirmation or denial, are by no means confined to those whom the popular opinion regards as too ready for "cock- sureness" or too prone persistently to object; much less to those whom the authorities have selected to fill our insane asylums. All of us are temperamentally inclined either to over-confidence or to excessive caution, and to distribute both our faiths and oiu- doubts without pausing to regard [89] WHAT CAN I KNOW? the weight of evidence. The born "scientist" tends to adopt one class of unverified faiths and unreasonable doubts; the man of moral and religious insights, another class; the man of artistic impulses, still another; and among all classes of knowers, the so-called "practical man" probably most needs to be constantly on guard against the influence of his temperamental handi- cap. Common-sense is indispensable for certain fundamental kinds of knowledge. It is a valua- ble associate judge or corroborative witness in the court that tries out the contesting claims of the disputants over various kinds of knowledge. But when it demands to see the invisible, to handle the intangible, to number and weigh the spiritual elements of human existence, and to discover the final purposes and last principles of Reality, without speculative imagination and range of intellect, it makes impossible for the mind it is guiding, the truths of supreme import and highest value. In recognizing or thinking one's way into the spiritual realities of science, as well as of art, morals, and religion, the man of mere common-sense is of all others most imbe- cile and untrustworthy. Thus it not infrequently happens that those who take the "practical " view of things know least about the truth of things; and those who boast most of "common" sense have little of any other kind of sense. In close dependence upon the truth which we have just been considering stands another which [90] BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW should determine the conduct of every sincere inquirer after his own solution of the problem. What is it for me to know? and so, What can 1 know? This truth concerns the good and the evil effects of habit in this matter. The forma- tion of habit introduces the scope of the individual will into the problem, How to be reasonably and fitly and, so to say, decently sure of what we know? For although our habits are largely made for us by inheritance and environment, they are to some appreciable and important extent, made by us for ourselves. By deliberate reflection we may supplement and intensify the lessons which unreflected experience is constantly impressing upon us. We may "rub in" the oint- ment that soothes or makes smart the wounds we have received to our pride of knowledge, through excess either of eagerness or of caution, of con- fidence or of doubt. He would be a rare ihan indeed, a human mind gifted with almost divine insight and wisdom, who did not discover many sad mistakes made by being too sure of the facts, or of one's private interpretation of them, and of many glorious opportunities lost through hesitation to act that was caused by what turned out to be unreasonable doubt. Hence the neces- sity for cultivation of habits that are aimed at the attainment of some ideal standard for the confidence with which we endow oiu- various knowledge-judgments. In this way we may cease habitually to be so much more confident than [91] WHAT CAN I KNOW? we ought to be about this matter of thought, and so much more sceptical than we are warranted in being about that other matter of thought. It is such culture that begets the reasonable mind; and this is the mind which habitually tries so to adjust the amount and direction of its assurance as to make conviction, or "subjective sufficiency," correspond to certainty, or "objec- tive sufficiency." No amount of culture in the preparation of material, or in the suspension of judgment, or in the weighing of evidence, can ever do away with the peculiarities of the individual knower, or abrogate the right of private judgment. Each individual will retain his own peculiar outfit of knowing faculty, will remain more easy to con- vince on some matters than on others, and will distribute his confidences and his doubts in his own way. Doubtless also, each one will forever be showing tendencies to unsoundness of judg- ment in one direction or another. We are for- tunate, if it is not in more than one direction. In the large world-adjustment, with its countless variety of species and no two individuals of any of the higher species, perhaps no two germinal cells, precisely alike, this variety of judgment- forming temperaments and habits, may be in the favor of a higher development of knowledge for the entire race as made up of these individuals. We believe it to be so. It is a benevolent divine dispensation, not only that all men do not think [92] BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW alike, but also that all men do not know the same partial truths or look at things in the same one- sided way. "Cock-sure" fellows and doubting Thomases both make their contributions to the growth of human knowledge, albeit in different ways. But there is a profounder truth than this, which has risen near enough the surface for us to grasp and recognize it at the present time. There are by inheritance, environment and habit, — and I for one do not hesitate to believe, by Divine gift of insight and inspiration, — members of the race especially prepared to announce with assured conviction truths that are only dimly apprehended and doubtfully held by the rest of us. In art, morals, and religion, these men are revealers of reality, long before the lagging and doubting experience of the race has justified their assurance. They are the seers who have the clear vision and the proofs by thoughtful reflection, of knowledge-judgments that establish themselves in the minds of the multitude only after years or centuries of racial experience has proved them true. And what is true of art, morals and religion, is true of the physical and psychological sciences as well. The accumula- tions of knowledge for the race, with the confidence which is generally reposed in its trust- worthiness as representative of actual facts and events and of real laws and principles, is justifi- ably based only on the assurance of those few whose insights and thoughts and inductions from [93] WHAT CAN I KNOW? guarded observations and experiments have guar- anteed this knowledge. In all fields of human endeavor the being sure of what we know is with most of us a second-hand and borrowed affair. It is not for this reason, however, any the less a logically justifiable affair. The individuality of this emotional element in all human knowledge, while it is more conspic- uous and more influential upon the growth of knowledge among mankind at large, in a com- paratively few cases, is no less essential and in a measure justifiable in the case of the inconspicu- ous multitude. The individual's experience is not as yet knowledge; but it is the only source of his knowledge, — if under the term we include not only what the individual observes and thinks and intuits "for himself," but also what he incorporates into his own experience from the observations, thoughts, and intuitions of others. This act of "incorporation" cannot be effective, cannot result in a system of knowledge-judg- ments, unless it partakes of the peculiarities of the individual in respect of the emotional element. All the body of each one's knowledge, to its toes and its finger-tips, must be made alive with this personal element, the feeling or sentiment of conviction. But the important question still presses, and all the more heavily on account of the concessions which have been forced from us in view of the infinite variety in the constitution and habits [94] BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW of individual knowers: How shall each individual, and how shall the race of men, secure the passage from conviction to certainty, from "subjective sufficiency " to "objective sufficiency? " How shall assurance be made the guaranty of knowledge? Here we are, of course, again referred to the nature of logical proof and to the accepted laws of evidence. And yet we have seen that the same proof and the same evidence have very diflFerent eflFects upon different minds. Each man's logic is hable to be swayed or dominated by the very feeling on which he rehes to secure its purity. It is quite as often in spite of argu- ments as in deference to arguments that some men are perfectly sure upon matters about which others are perpetually and hopelessly in doubt. Why can not the minds of all men come to some agreement, at least upon the great majority of important truths; since they are constituted essentially alike? Why does not human judg- ment upon what is really so, carry always more nearly the same measiu-e of assurance and also of doubt? Before we attempt the very partial and not quite clear answer which can be given to this important question we must briefly examine two distinctions which, when made in the customary hard didactic form, inevitably obscure the whole subject. Indeed, this problem of knowledge, like every other scientific or philosophical problem, has suffered lamentably from the attempt to draw [95] WHAT CAN I KNOW? thick and rigid lines where Hfe and reality have left all in a muss of mingled chiaro-oscuro. For life and reality are in general, not an etching on steel but a water-color made by Japanese art to represent a Japanese atmosphere. These two distinctions are the distinction between subjective conviction and objective cer- tainty, and the distinction between beheving and knowing. It is not that similar distinctions are not justifiable and valuable; they are both. But for the last one hundred years they have been drawn with too heavy a hand and in terms of too great precision. The chief reasons for this are to be found in excessive deference to the "pedagogic primness" of Kant and to the "cock- sureness" of modern science. A very healthy reaction, itself, however, tending to the other extreme, is now taking place. There is no absolutely sure passage, either for the individual or for the race, from subjective conviction to objective certainty. Conviction will always vary in its intensity and steadiness, according to the nature and mental habits of the subject, whose conviction it is, and accord- ing to the subject about which the conviction is exercised. On the other hand, the certainty which is attached, or which can reasonably be attached, to any form of knowledge, or to any particular knowledge-judgment, is no fixed affair. The more earnest and thorough is our endeavor to place our assurance of knowledge on grounds [96] BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW which will render it sufficient or compulsory for every knower, who has not had our experience or does not and can not take our points of view, the more convinced do we become of the elements of irremovable doubt that lurk in all claims to an absolute objective certainty. All this and more will become somewhat clearer, after we have in the next chapter examined the degrees and limits of knowledge. For there are degrees, and there are limits, to all human knowledge. This quali- fication of degrees attaches itself inseparably to every kind and to every act of knowing, whoever the knower may be. Somewhat similar criticism must be made with respect to the Kantian distinction between believ- ing and knowing. As we have already seen, this great critic of the human reason and its various so-called faculties and spheres of activity, dis- tinguished believing from knowing in a categorical way. His principle of division was just this "certainty" which was somehow supposed to be added to beheving in order to convert it into knowing. But the distinction, when made in so rough and bald a manner, is psychologically false. Indeed, there are obvious signs that Kant wrote the short chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason in which he makes the distinction, in a, for him, unusually thoughtless and careless way. The distinction itself he virtually himself abrogates in his other great treatise, that on the Practical Reason. But Pure Reason does not effect knowl- [97] WHAT CAN I KNOW? edge without believing; and the faiths of the so-called Practical Reason are productive of many of the highest and surest and most logically indorsed among our knowledge-judgments. In saying this we are not referring to the common- place truth that all knowledge either rests upon, or is involved in, the validity of certain so-called instinctive beliefs. Nor are we taking the posi- tion of those theologians who would rest upon faith, their acceptance, as items of assured knowl- edge, of certain doctrines of Scripture or dogmas of the Church. We mean, the rather, that the assurance which guarantees the reality of the objects and truths in which we believe, as we are wont to say, is not essentially different in quality, or in origin, or in its value as evidence, from the assurance which guarantees the reality of the objects and truths about which we claim to know. Indeed, whenever the assurance of belief attains a certain degree of intensity and a quality of steadiness of character, we speak of it as knowl- edge. On the other hand, when assurance begins to show dim, or to withdraw its support from our judgment, we begin to question whether what we thought knowledge is anything more certain than a doubtful belief. But we are just as ready to say that we do not believe in that way any longer. The real differences between our beliefs and our knowledge are chiefly these two: Our behefs are more largely based upon experiences of emotion [98] BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW and sentiment in a predominating way; and the most intense and tenacious of them are attached to judgments about matters that have some kind of ideal value. Many of these beliefs, however, are not more difficult to establish on valid grounds of experience, nor are the processes of thought by which we argue our way to their truthfulness more circuitous or illogical, than are what we call the proofs of the great majority of our knowledge- judgments. Reasonable proofs of the faiths that concern the ultimately true, the good, and the beautiful, are not necessarily more deficient in cogency or less satisfying to our de- mand for "objective sufficiency" than are the more general conceptions and laws of the posi- tive sciences. Indeed, these very conceptions and laws are themselves largely dependent for their certainty on fundamental beliefs, which science shares with art, morality, and religion. Thus the thoughtful student of nature, who becomes convicted with a quite complete assurance con- cerning its order, harmony, obedience to law, and conformity to various human ideals, is no more and no less reasonable, than the student of morals or religion, who trusts similar convictions for his conclusions as to the reaUty of the ethical concep- tion of society or the personal ideal of religious faith and worship. And now the question which is of the highest theoretical significance and of the greatest prac- tical importance recurs in yet more complicated [99] WHAT CAN I KNOW? form. The problem of one's private right and personal ability to claim knowledge on any particular subject of knowledge can not be solved by one's intensity and obstinacy in the assurance of knowledge. What can I know? is a question for every man which can not be settled by a bare appeal to the feeling or sentiment of knowledge. A can not pat himself on the back and say to B: "I surely know this, because I feel sure about it." But then B cannot retort to A: "You certainly do not know it, because I do not feel sure about it." It is even conceivable that one man alone may know what no one else knows. On the other hand, on some subjects the knowledge of a very few is the only safe guide to the assurance of knowledge for the entire race. In these and similar undoubted facts of human universal experi- ence we must find our way, if such way is to be found at all, to the path that leads from subjec- tive conviction to objective reality. The best general answer to the inquiry now perplexing our minds may be given in some such words as these: In order to gain as much as is possible of objective certainty, we must make our beliefs and our knowledge-judgments as reasonable as possible. The art of making them "reasonable" has already been partially dis- closed. It consists in cultivating habits of prompt and accurate recognition and of the disposition and skill in ratiocination, to think things through to the end of a fuller understanding of them. [100] BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW Availing one's self of all happy intuitions and suggestions, whether they arise spontaneously in one's own mind or come to it from others; ob- serving carefully and pondering thoughtfully the facts of nature and of himaan life; cherishing the generous heart and the hearty interest in all manner of truths, with the justifiable persuasion that they are, if not closely interlocked, at least distantly related; and banishing as far as one can all misleading prejudice and deterrent jealousies, — so shall one be saved from living chiefly in a world of illicit though pleasing illusions or of weakening agnosticism and depressing doubts. Making one's beUefs and knowledges reason- able, therefore, undoubtedly involves an acquain- tance and use of the so-called logical processes, the kind and degree of which are dependent on the presence or absence of a quasi-scientific train- ing. But to think logically about the experiences which are forced upon us by the realities and relations, whether of our daily life or of the phenomena with which the positive sciences deal, is a very different thing from trying to apply to them the formulas of pure logic or the calculations of pure mathematics. The real world is not con- structed after the strictest pattern of either the Euclidean or the modem geometry, or of the logic of Aristotle or the dialectic of Hegel. But it is a world which we know the more thoroughly and to whose regular behavior or seeming caprices and contradictions we adapt ourselves more safely, [101] WHAT CAN I KNOW? the more thoroughly reasonable we make our beliefs and our knowledge-judgments. I have said that a "quasi-scientific training" is indispensable for the best success in making the transition from subjective conviction to objec- tive certainty, or — better said — in rendering reasonable the various degrees of assurance attached to our judgments, whether we call them believing or knowing. As a matter of fact, each one of the positive sciences has worked out for itself a somewhat special way of rendering its assurance of knowledge more reasonable, — a technique of examination, a select method of proof. In so far as any individual knows and can himself use, or can appreciate the use by others, of this technique and this method, he is the better equipped for the work of rationalizing his own convictions. But if, in any branch of human knowledge, any individual knower neither does know nor cares to know, or perhaps is hopelessly imfitted to know, how to get or to approximate the truth of reality, then he must either confess ignorance and surrender all claim to a reasonable conviction, or must take his judgments with their accompanying measure of conviction, solely on authority. And, indeed, it is on the basis of authority that the judgments of the multitude must rest in the great majority of all the truths proclaimed by the positive sciences. In general, however, every man, no matter how ignorant of the ever-changing conclusions [102] BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW as respects the details of fact and the explanatory causes and ultimate principles of the modern sciences, may follow with a fair measure of cheer and hopefulness the task of rendering his convic- tions as to what is true and what not true, more and more reasonable. For him as an individual, as for all the positive sciences and for all the world at large, the safe rule and valid measure and desirable end of reasoning is essentially the same. It is the 'production of harmony in the system of experiences. If the new fact, or the recently observed event, or the just discovered or conjec- tured cause, does not fit in with the rest of our already systematized experiences, we hesitate about receiving it, we withhold from it for the time being the assurance which it assumes to claim. But if, accepted as fact it harmonizes with, or accepted as cause it better explains, the system of our experiences as already constituted, lien we greet it with a certain degree of satis- faction, which in not a few cases amounts to a positive joy. But if the fact refuses to harmo- nize, and yet stoutly persists in asserting itself as fact, it must bide its time. Dissonances are not reduced to harmony by banging the piano. That the feeling or sentiment of truth is nor- mally a pleasant feeling, has long been recognized by psychologists. But that doubt is normally a feeling of uneasiness, a sentiment which tends to linlc itself with painful emotions, has been held to be equally obvious. Those, therefore, who [103] WHAT CAN I KNOW? seem to rejoice in doubt and unbelief are quite habitually compelled to comfort themselves with the pleasant feelings which flow from the con- sciousness of doing one's duty and standing by the truth at all cost; or with the smug satisfac- tion of a belief in their intellectual superiority to the common run of mankind. He, then, who wishes to have the assurance of knowledge only when it is reasonable will be un- tiringly striving for nearer and nearer approaches to a harmony in the system of his experience and of the beliefs and judgments to which these experiences have already led him. In the in- terests of harmonizing he will not sophisticate or refuse the facts of reality, however brought to his attention; but in the interests of harmony he will rationalize these facts to the end that his distribution of assurance and of doubt among the complex of beliefs and knowledge-judgments which constitute the "making-up" of his "mind" may become more and more reasonable. The yet more exacting test of the objective certainty of the beliefs and knowledges of man- kind, and of every individual man, depends upon the way that these beliefs and judgments har- monize with the experience of the race. Of these beliefs and these knowledges every individual has some share. It comes to him by inheritance, by tradition, by the teachings of the learned and the wise, by the discoveries of the sciences and the progress of manufactures, of commerce, and [104] BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW the arts, in dependence on these discoveries. But humanity knows more, and more surely, than any individual knows. Not less but more valid, therefore, is the knowledge which every individual renders more reasonable according to the fulness and depth of his share in the scientific achieve- ments, practical successes, moral convictions and religious beliefs of the race. These convictions and beliefs must themselves be tested by their reasonableness. And with them, too, reasonable- ness will depend for the degree of objective cer- tainty to which it is entitled, upon the way in which the judgments to which the convictions and beliefs are attached, harmonize with the ever- growing system of the intellectual and social evolution of the race. Harmony with this system is the ultimate test, so far as ultimate test can be had, which the reasonings of the human race, on a basis of facts of racial experience, is striving forward toward but never finding quite securely reached. The assumption that the reality which the race is bound to believe in, and is ever striv- ing more sufficiently to know, is itself a rational system, underlies all hmnan knowledge and all growth in knowledge. It is an assumption which demands further recognition in more than one other connection. There are some practical considerations which have a claim to our attention as flowing out of the views to which we seem compelled by raising the inquiry, "How to be sure of what we know." [105] WHAT CAN I KNOW? First, and perhaps most important of all, is tUs. There are certain very valuable beliefs, chiefly in the domains of morals and religion, against the truthfulness of which men who do not have the beliefs can not argue on terms of equality with men who have them. The failure of Haeckel to believe in a personal God and Redeemer is no counter argument for a mind with the experiences of the Apostle Paul and of millions of others of the human race. There is truth also in the bold, irreverent witticism of Labouchere: "Mere denial of the existence of God does not entitle a man's opinion to be taken without scrutiny on matters of greater importance." Nor does the scoffing of a Voltaire at all manifestations of the super- natural reasonably serve to diminish the con- fidence of a Jerry McAuley in the belief that spiritual forces not his own, or emanating from other mortals, have effected a sudden and pro- found change in the springs of his entire being. On the other hand, the unwitting or more delib- erate admissions of both these agnostics may confirm, rather than controvert, those processes of reasoning, or so-called proofs, for the being of God as Ethical Spirit, which have been slowly evolving themselves from the religious experience of mankind. Just so Mr. Spencer, after agreeing with Dean Mansel in the judgment that the abstract "conception of absolute and infinite, from whatever side we view it, appears com- passed with contradictions," goes on to appeal [106] BEING SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW to his own conception of the "Unknown Cause" for a moral justification on the ground of the sincerity of his own religious beHef. Meanwhile the progress of rational thinking, in its effort to ground the most precious and persistent of man's moral and rehgious beliefs in the facts of the physical and psychological sciences, is eliminat- ing many of the contradictions, and supplying some of the deficiencies, in the current conceptions touching Nature and God as the Supernatural. And every individual, according to his ability to share in this progress may make the assurance of his faith and hope more distinctly reasonable, more reasonably sure. One other inexpressible benefit flows from the discipline of subjecting our convictions to the treat- ment of reason with a view to gain for them an increased certainty. This discipline leaves enough of sufficiently certain belief and knowledge for us to Hve by, in most practical matters; but it also cul- tivates a spirit of repose in the middle ground be- tween the mirage-breeding mists of over-assurance and the distressing bogs of hopeless doubt. It be- gets the peace of being satisfied, not surely to know, but to accept as sound knowledge-judgments a host of conclusions that can claim only a higher or lower degree of probability. There are many com- forts and other advantages ia being willing not to be sure. In many matters, even those of greatest import, the wise man walks in the middle of the road. He is neither agnostic nor "cock-sure." [107] CHAPTER V DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE "THAT all those judgments which constitute the body of human knowledge, whether of the individual or of the race, are not held with an equal degree of assurance or con- sidered to be equally securely placed upon grounds of proof, has already been made sufficiently clear. And yet our habit, both of speaking and of think- ing, is wont to be somewhat disturbed by the declaration that there are degrees in all human knowledge. For do we not hear people repeating the time-worn phrases: "If a thing is so it is so"; and "If I do know, and not merely think or guess, it to be so, than I know it to be so." About the commonest items of knowledge, we hear men offering to bet all they own, or to stake their heads or their lives, — not considering that every man is momently staking his life in the con- fidence of judgments which no man can hold with other than a lower or higher degree of probability. The doctrine of the degrees of knowledge, as such, will be better understood, if we can suggest some thermometer, as it were, which will, at least roughly, measure these degrees. Such an even [108] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE approximately reliable standard of measurement can not be found in the amount of heat which belongs to our subjective convictions. It is much better supplied — to change the metaphor — by the harmonies of the chords which resound in the mind when the new note is struck within its environment. Now all measurements imply a standard of a graded nature, a scale of values, along which the objects to be measured may be ranged, and also, an attempt to get as near as possible to something which shall be "absolute," or afflicted only with the smallest amount of changes. By this rela- tively fixed standard all things which belong to the same class may have their positions fixed as relative to one another. Two different indicators for taking the degrees of verity attached to our judgments have been somewhat widely accepted theoretically, and have been widely used in the practice of making the necessary distinctions. A large field of human knowledge has its claim to certainty con- stantly measured and re-measured by the satis- faction it gives to the inquiring intellect in the form of its scientific character. The objects and occurrences in this field may be weighed and measured in scales and by tape-lines, or micromet- rically. They can be handled and carried on to highly probable conclusions by rough calcula- tions or by the higher mathematics. They can be observed with microscope, telescope, or as in [109] WHAT CAN I KNOW? the crucible, or under the action of some form of re-agents. The truth acquired in this way is called "scientific"; and much well-founded praise is bestowed upon the successful efforts of a grow- ing number of the world's best intellects that are devoted to giving to this body of knowledge the highest degree of objective certainty. Along their scale of degrees the positive sciences are constantly making rival claims for the upper places in its register. The "purer" the science — that is, the more it can rely on mathematics or on an untroubled course of demonstrative reason- ing, — the higher it stands in the scale. But, unfortunately, the purer any science remains, the less of verifiable knowledge it has to give us as to the real constitution and actual causal connec- tions of the world of our experience. For this kind of knowledge, with the objective certainty which we desire for it, we have to go to the so- called applied sciences. And here we enter at once the arena of contested claims. For example: a former colleague of mine, a professor of physics, was accustomed to argue with no little heat that he taught the only real science in the college cur- riculum; and when I once ventured to ask the leading authority in the country on this subject, whether he considered meteorology a science, he responded rather tartly and with snapping eyes: "It is just as much of a science as geology is." The retort was plainly significant of many a heated argument with his University colleague whose [ 110 ] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE specialty was the latter subject. Without enter- ing into this or any similar debate, and without yielding to the temptation to invent any new classification of the "positive" sciences according to some valid standard of their positiveness, we will say that all human knowledge may be ranked as higher or lower in the degree of its valid claims to certainty, according to its scientific character. The value of this standard and the validity of its application are increased when we consider that in all essentials there is no difference between what we call science and much of the most ordi- nary so-called practical knowledge. The soil of all the sciences is in the things of which the average man knows, and is obliged to know somewhat, in order that he may secure by his own action any of the goods, or by his own action escape any of the evils, of his daily life. Astronomy sprang out of the observations of the common sailor or of the half-credulous, half keen-witted astrol- oger. Chemistry had for its foster-mother the "toolings" of innumerable cranks, or the sus- picions of the ignorant concerning the invisible elements of visible things. Modern medicine owes its most triumphant use of cures obtained from the world of plants and minerals to the experiments — resulting as often in death or having no result as effecting cures — of quacks and priests and old-women, who were shrewd to take account of the symptoms and of the hopes and [111] WHAT CAN I KNOW? fears, the suggestibility, of the vulgar crowd. Not infrequently, modern science is obliged to turn about and accept, at least for re-examination, the conclusions of the common and unscientific experience, which it had rejected as unworthy of further credence or testing. And some of the so-called sciences — notably, for example, that mixture of somewhat arbitrary selections from other kindred branches of knowledge or conjec- ture, with not a few unverifiable hypotheses of its own, known as sociology — are less able to ex- plain the past or predict the future than many a wise observer of phenomena who would never think of claiming any measure of scientific attain- ments. A delegate to the World's Congress of Naturalists, who had from boyhood been brought up in close companionship with the typical primitive man, the savage native of Australia, once said to the author: "I take oflf my hat every time to the native when it is a question of what is to be known about the flora and the fauna of his own environment." In saying such things as these it is not the in- tention to depreciate modern science, its methods of precision or the certainty of its conclusions. We are simply reminding ourselves that, with respect to certain things in our common human experience, there are no sharp limits between what is called science and ordinary knowledge. In both, the degree of certainty is dependent upon the satis- faction which the intellect receives from a more [112] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE clear and conclusive explanation of the phenom- ena, when the various appropriate tests are ap- plied, and from the improved results gained by the growth of knowledge in the use of physical things. It is in all this field of knowledge that the theory of pragmatism is most successful when it relies upon illustrative material. The truest kind of hoe, the one most scientifically con- structed, is the hoe that does the business. But if the gardener has found out by his own limited experiments that this particular kind of a hoe does in fact work the best of any that he has tried, the science of physics — physics of the handle and the blade, physics of the soil, and psycho-physics of the nervo-muscular organism — may be able to explain why it is so. Science may result in giving him a better hoe; or it may result in substituting the steam-plow for the hoe. But if the man with the hoe has himself observed and reflected upon the why of his experience, he has started on the path of scientific knowledge. It is the same path all the way to the steam-plow and on into the explanation of the forces which work in and through the most complicated mech- anism. It is the ever shifting but increasingly more sure standards of the intellect in its search for explanation and in its ambition to improve the conditions of the physical life, that determine the degrees which must be acclaimed to this class of knowledge- judgments. A more extensive and [113] WHAT CAN I KNOW? accurate acquaintance with the qualities of things, with their causal and other relations as explana- tory of events; a better compacted and more harmonious system of formulas embodying the results of the widening experience of mankind; and all this leading to a more effective use of the means of improved physical existence, — such are the characteristics of that body of knowledge which has its degrees determined and raised to higher and higher power as measured by one kind of standard. But there is another kind of knowledge the degrees of which must be measured by another kind of standard. This knowledge is given in the form of judgments that affirm or deny the realities which correspond to man's ideals of the true, the beautiful, and the good. The judg- ments themselves, as has already been said, have their roots in certain very persistent and very profound but practically universal emotions and sentiments. The particular, concrete terms of the judgments in which this form of knowledge expresses itself are in a constant process of evolu- tion. In this important respect they share the nature of all human knowledge. It is a growth for the race as well as for the individual. The goal towards which this progress of knowledge goes forward, often with dim or almost com- pletely blind eyes, and always as "seeing through a glass darkly," is the realization of certain spiritual ideals. The standard which measures [114] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE the degrees of this sort of knowledge is deter- mined by the values of these ideals. The spiritual conceptions of science (I do not hesitate to use the words in this connection), the artistic, moral and reUgious conceptions and judgments of human- ity, are the field over the area of which this sort of measurement prevails. When it is a question whether the world of physical objects is a chance resultant of unconscious Power, an ill-consorted jumble of antagonistic existences and contend- ing forces, a "pluralistic universe," or an orderly and sublimely beautiful and rational whole, a Cosmos, a Divine evolution, the argument is compelled to take a diflferent turn from that which is satisfactory in discussing some petty detail of some one of the positive sciences. Emo- tions that favor judgments appealing to man's respectful love of the sublime, of the orderly and the beautiful, refuse to be denied their weighty influences in the controversy. The standard by which the degree of knowledge to be assigned to any one of the several theories of the art of world- building which has actually been in operation through countless myriads of years, is no longer one of a purely intellectual and practical sort. The demands of ideals that have value, and that control our value-judgments, now make themselves powerfully felt. No theory of evolution can ever repose on strictly scientific grounds. Every such theory is a sort of conglomerate Ideal. Even more true and sure is the experience of [115] WHAT CAN I KNOW? mankind in the progressive, historical formation of its moral consciousness and its prevalent judg- ments and practices concerning what it is more or less right, more or less wrong, to think and to do. At no time in man's history has the morally right and wrong been fixed by positive science or by statutory enactment. Men have always be- lieved, and will always continue to beUeve, that the true standard for adjusting distances between the actual and the ideal, in matters of public and private righteousness, cannot be made objec- tively certain on purely scientific grounds. Above all is this truth applicable in the attempt to assign degrees of knowledge to the judgments which men hold touching the verities of religion. To bring the so-called proof for the being of God into terms satisfactory to the exact methods of the positive sciences has always failed. It will always continue to fail. For this is the realm within which the values of the ideals to which the human spirit most tenaciously clings have their greatest and most legitimate influence. This difference in standards by which the dif- ferent degrees of two kinds of knowledge are rated produces some curious and most impres- sive results. Among the most beneficial of these results is the unceasing attempt at harmoniz- ing the interpretation of all man's experience as regarded from these two points of view and as subjected to these two standards of measure- ment. This attempt follows naturally from the [116] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE very nature of knowledge. In the most positive of the sciences, the influence of feeling and of ideals is not altogether absent; in the most spirit- ual of the experiences of art, morals, or religion, the work of the intellect cannot be excluded. The highest and most obscure of the artistic, ethical and religious emotions, may be made subjects of analysis and bases for argument as to correlated realities. And so the reconciliation of science and religion, of art and physical and psycho-physical facts, of the demands of cultivated and inviolate conscience with existing custom and legality, is a most important part of the culture and growth of knowledge, in the individual and in the race. Another result of this difference in standards is of a more paiaful sort. Not a few men — perhaps in the present day, a majority — either try to content themselves with holding diverse or contradictory judgments as estimated by these two standards; or else they abandon all attempt at reconciliation and hold exclusively either to the so-called scientific conception of the World or to that which builds upon the truthfulness of the value- judgments. They take the exclusively scientific, or the exclusively ethico-religious view of the world. Thus at one time, the late Mr. Romanes appeared to himself to have lost both knowledge and faith as to the realities of religion, out of his trusted experiences. Yet he always expressed his sincere regret at his inability to secure either faith or knowledge about subjects [117] WHAT CAN I KNOW? having such a high intrinsic value. But it was just the experience of their value in which he ought to have found the assurance of faith grow- ing into knowledge. On the other side, what vast numbers of theologians and biblical scholars have always been on hand to resist every attempt at a scientific construction of the history of crea- tion or at an explanation of some group of natural phenomena, because it did not correspond with their preconceived ideal of God and of his rela- tions to the world of things and men! The only fully satisfying knowledge of particular things and events, or of the Universe at large, includes both standards. True knowledge advances through the reconciliation of facts with ideals. But is there no absolute standard for all kinds and every individual act of knowledge? If we could find such a standard, is it not conceivable that we might apply it and so infallibly and once for all fix the degree to be assigned to every claimant to the title of true judgment? Or, must we not the rather say that the word "knowl- edge" should be reserved for only such judgments as come up to this absolute standard? All others might then be called belief, opinion, or at best, scientific hypothesis or theory. The attempt to find an absolute and indispu- table standard for knowledge has occupied the minds of philosophers for many centuries; and various schemes and maxims have thereby been devised. But the trouble is that as they approxi- [118] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE mate the truth, they become more and more abstract; and as they become more abstract, they become more and more practically useless. No better formula for absolute knowledge has ever been devised than that employed by him who has been called "the father of modern philos- ophy," the thinker and soldier, Rene Descartes. This formula, which was to serve as an absolute standard, he expressed in the Latin words: "Co- gito, ergo sum" (<7e pense, done je suis; I think, therefore I am). It was soon pointed out that as an argument, the formula was illogical; be- cause it involved in the premises all that was in the conclusion. But although Descartes used the logical word ergo to connect the conclusion with the premise, he never intended to present this absolute standard in the form of an argument. Of course, any proposition which admits of argu- ment is not absolute. What Descartes meant was this: In all self-conscious thinking we are face-to-face, in an absolutely indubitable way, with our own existence. The wits of the day and of the days since have made fun of this formula. Why not say: "I walk, therefore I am?" Just as well, if only I am aware of my- self as what appears to me, even in a dream, to be in a state of walking. Who would hesitate to say that without being alive, I cannot even dream of myself as walking? The absolute truth is that I cannot do any thing, perform any mental act self-consciously, without involving the indubi- [119] WHAT CAN I KNOW? table face-to-face knowledge of being then-and- there existent. To say dubito or ignoro (I doubt or I do not know) is every whit as valid an asser- tion of this fact, which for me admits of no possi- bility of doubt, as to say cogito. Indeed, for the young law-student to whom reference was made in another chapter, "I do not know" was about himself at the time the only truthful propo- sition. But plainly this formula is neither full of truths that can be developed into a system possessing the same certainty which belongs of full right to it; nor is it adapted to serve us a sort of uni- versally applicable test for the degree of verity attaching itself to other judgments. Children do not grow in knowledge by assuring themselves of the Cartesian formula. Even in our psycho- logical laboratories we can make little or no use of this abstract "cogito" in advancing the knowl- edge of the human mind. The formula does not even enable us to distinguish between the most imdoubted verities of our waking life and the wildest of dreams. Perhaps Tartini did really dream out his "Devil's Sonata," and Voltaire, one version of his song to Henriadne. Dan- necker's colossal "Christus" may have first ap- peared to him as a dream-image. All of these artists may have been vividly conscious of their dream-objects; they may even have been con- scious of themselves as dreamers. Thus the dreamlike experience, when analyzed, may have [120] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE had concealed within it all the quality of absolute certainty demanded by the celebrated maxim of Descartes. But the reality of the dream-objects would share, even less than the similar objects of their waking experience, in the quality of being placed beyond the possibility of doubt. And so it happened with our philosopher that when he attempted to pass, with a demonstra- tion compelling xmqualified consent, from the reality of his own then-and-there self-conscious existence to the reality of the world of things and the reality of God, his argument failed to attain anything like universal acceptance. Indeed, as a demonstration it is now universally rejected. We come back, therefore, to the only position in which the knower can contemplate his destiny with the peace of mind that comes from a min- gling of docility and enterprise. We have raised for each individual the question, What can I know.'' And having soon discovered that no man can put absolute confidence in his convictions, or in the intensity of his sentiment of truth, to guarantee the objective certainty of his knowl- edge, we have raised the further question as to how this end may be approximately attained with varying degrees of reasonableness. Our answer has been of the following somewhat com- plicated sort. If you wish to know as surely as possible what it especially behooves you to know, you must cultivate your intellectual faculty, your power to think your way into and through [121] WHAT CAN I KNOW? things, — their origins, their qualities, their rela- tions, their causes, the laws of their behavior, and their uses. You must use these same intel- lectual powers, to learn about things from others who have more scientific training and more ex- perience warranting claims to scientific knowledge. But you are not a being of pure intellect, a mere calculating machine, summing up the restilts of a vast amount of refined instrumentation. You have experiences of longing, aspiration, spiritual satisfaction or disappointment, in the dim or fuller view of certain ideals. These experiences give rise to certain value-judgments, which it is cus- tomary to call beliefs rather than knowledge. But you cannot afford to sacrifice or depreciate these value-judgnlents, or permanently refuse to allow them a place in your rationalized system of knowledge. You must cling to them, purify, elevate and deepen them. Above all must you honestly and steadfastly endeavor to harmonize your total experience in your personal attitude of intellect, feeling, and will, toward a World of physical and spiritual realities. Thus you will become rational, which is by no means the same thing as having an intellect sharpened by too exclusive devotion to some one or more of the positive sciences. In the doctrine of the Degrees of human knowl- edge, it is plainly implied that there are Limits to all human knowledge. And the path of the progress of both science and philosophy is strewn [122] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE with the attempts arbitrarily to fix these Umits. Ahnost oftener than not these limits have been set so as virtually to shut out the human mind from all knowledge; if indeed by knowledge we under- stand any mental attitude which is the trust- worthy correlate of the actual and the real. In this view knowledge does not correspond to reality as having any existence independent of the act of knowing itself. Among such attempts to fix in a demonstra- tive way the limits of knowledge, the following are a few of the more prominent. There is first of all — as estimated by its influence on modem thinking — the limits set by the critical philoso- phy of Kant. He set limits and fenced them in forever by an irremovable and insurmountable wall of a distinction. This distinction was between phenomena and noumena or things-in-themselves. Human knowledge was, and from the nature of the human mind could only be, of phenomena; the real thing, the thing-in-itself, lay beyond the horizon of human vision. We are indeed obliged to assume that it is; but what it is, in general or any single instance, we can never know. Thus the domain of science is for Kant "an island and enclosed by nature itself within limits that can never be changed. It is the country of truth (a very attractive name) but surroimded by the wide and stormy ocean, the true home of illu- sion, where many a fog bank and ice that soon melts away tempt us to believe in new lands, [123] WHAT CAN I KNOW? while constantly deceiving the adventurous mari- ner with vain hopes, and involving him in adven- tures which he can never leave off, and yet can never bring to an end." The island of Kant cannot grow out into the ocean; the ocean can never clear itself of fog and ice, and no mariner can devise chart or compass which may enable him to diminish by so much as a square yard its dreary waste. It is there; but not as the bearer on its bosom of land that may be discovered in the future; it is the infinite and absolutely unknow- able by man. In essentially the same way, in more recent years, has Mr. Bradley worked the distinction between "Appearance and Reality" so as to con- fine all the achievements of the intellect to the maze of contradictions that are inherent in the world of seeming, while being forever excluded from the assured knowledge of the world that is real, and the theatre of actual events. In another, and as he supposed more learned and satisfactory way, did Sir William Hamilton propose to fix the unalterable limits of human knowledge. His formula he consecrated as the "Law of the Unconditioned." All the conceiv- able for man lies between two contradictory but equally inconceivable opposites. Of these oppo- sites, though both are inconceivable, one is neces- sary. You either become a despairing agnostic or cling by faith to one of the two inconceivables. This Hamiltonian formula Dean Mansel applied [124] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE to the limitation of thought on topics of rehgious moment, but in the supposed interests of religious faith, with a special permission in the name of man's intellectual constitution to beUeve in the absolutely inconceivable. We have already re- ferred to the way Mr. Herbert Spencer caught up the admissions of Sir William and Dean Mansel in favor of his own attempt to reconcile science and religion on the basis of the admission that the true being of the world is forever the Unknowable. To all these attempts and to all similar attempts, however elaborately and skilfully dressed out, there remain two fatal objections. They are based on a totally false conception of the nature of knowledge, quite irrespective of its form or of its degree. Knowledge is never of phenomena or appearances only. A sense, a conviction, a more or less developed conception and a more or less firm grasp of reality, belong to the very essence of knowledge. We do not sense the phenomenon, although the act of sensing may be considered as a phenomenon; we know by our senses something of which we are sure, about the thing itself. When we say, "It looks, or sounds, or feels, so and so," we never think of ourselves as talking about, as it were, detached appearances, but about the actual qualities of real things. And he makes a mockery of the most intense and realistic of all human experi- ences who tries to reduce our beliefs and thoughts and formulas concerning the active causal rela- [125] WHAT CAN I KNOW? tions among things, and between minds and things, to the thin and ghostly shape of a merely temporal sequence in the phenomena or appear- ances of wholly unknown realities. There is in general a sincerity, and oftentimes there is a terror, that accompanies all our growing ac- quaintance with the relations and uses of things, such as to leave no room for doubt that they are not dependent on our ideas or our wills for either their existence or for the causal powers which we learn to know that they possess. No ! the distinc- tive and most obvious quality of our human knowledge is denied when it is reduced in its application to the phenomenal and apparent only. Carrying out this thought into the interpreta- tion, not so much of the conscious activities of the individual in every act of knowledge, as of the fundamental beliefs and conceptions which characterize the foundations of science and the historical development of all the sciences, we disclose another fatal objection to the Kantian way of limiting knowledge. Science admits the existence of an indefinitely vast ocean of the unknown surrounding the island already only very partially explored by the himian intellect. But it is the ocean of the hitherto unknown rather than of the essentially unknowable. Its sturdy mariners are all the while, with better built ships and greatly improved instruments of navigation and of survey, plowing their way in every direction out into this vast ocean. They [126] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE are adding to the precision and extent of its charts. They are discovering new islands, from which as its annexed territories, science may advance to still further explorations of the un- known but not the unknowable. And it never once enters the heads of the scientific explorers, except when they lay aside their work-a-day faiths and dream in terms of an enervated meta- physics, that they are simply making new com- binations and concatenations of phenomena rather than increasing the extent and the precision of the world's stock of knowledge about actual events in a system of interacting real existences. Knowl- edge, so long as it is partial and finite, is limited indeed; but not in such a way as to make it no true knowledge. Knowledge is always and es- sentially oj realities and never merely oj phe- nomena. To the question how knowledge and the realities are related, we shall return at another time. But there is another and much more subtle way of drawing the limits around all human knowledge. The essentials of its contention must be admitted; though the most agnostic of its conclusions may be averted. This is the doctrine of the so-called "relativity of all knowledge." This doctrine is as old as the historic beginnings of the line of philosophical development in which we are standing today, although it was traced anew and in more compelling form by the author of the modem critical philosophy. "Man is the [127] WHAT CAN I KNOW? measure of all things; of that which is, how it is; of that which is not; how it is not": — so ran the already once quoted maxim ascribed by Plato to the Sophist Protagoras. And the essential truth upon which Kant founded his psychologi- cally false and mischievous distinction between phenomena and noumena was this: it is the constitution of the human mind which determines how all objects shall be apprehended by the senses and comprehended in their various rela- tions by the intellect. Undoubtedly, man is for man the measure of all things. But does it follow from this that, for every individual man, that is true and real which at the time appears so to him; and — a conclusion still more fraught with baleful consequences — that there is possible for humanity only a subjective and relative, not an objective and universal truth.? Man is, of course, the measure of all man's knowledge; and, indeed, what other measure could there possibly he? This declaration may be so expanded as to make us sure, first, that the essential nature of his knowing faculty limits his knowledge; and, second, that no guaranty of the trustworthiness of knowledge can be found outside, so to say, of this same faculty. To express the truth in familiar figures of speech: "The greyhound cannot outrun his own shadow"; "The bird cannot rise above the atmosphere," etc. Hence, whatever claims may be made for the philosophical intuition of the Absolute or [ 128 ] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE the mystical intuition of God; for communion by thought-transference with friends over seas or by mediums or materiaHzations with those beyond the grave; for miracles, whether wrought by immediate divine agency or through the alleged power of salvation-mongers; they must all conform to the constitution of the human mind and the ways of its functioning, in order to be apprehended and criticized, whether for ac- ceptance or rejection. And this complex faculty of knowledge is itself in a process of evolution. But however it evolves, human knowledge will always be only human knowledge. And, indeed, — we ask again — what else could it possibly be? What else could any knower wish it to be.'' The reasonable interpretation of the principle of the relativity of all knowledge should afford the person who asks himself seriously the ques- tion, What can I know.? two practical rules of no small importance and helpfulness. The first is, not arbitrar ily to fix the possibl eJlmi ts of knowl- e dge in any particular direction: the second is, not in vain to beat against the bars which set the limits between the possible and the impossible. Both these salutary rules may be illustrated to- gether by a few examples. Sir Isaac Newton insisted that all "natural phenomena," including the biological, should be reduced to "mathe- matical laws." Much saner was the conclusion advocated centuries earlier by the greatest thinker of antiquity, the philosopher Aristotle. He held [129] . WHAT CAN I KNOW? that the different matters of science differ in them- selves so essentially that they do not admit in their treatment of the same method of "pre- cision." And by precision he meant a combina- tion of mathematical exactness, metaphysical subtlety, minuteness of detail, and definiteness of assertion. With reference to the possibilities of knowledge of the biological order it may not now, and it may never be, quite possible to afl&rm with assurance the universal domination of mathematical laws. We think it safe to say, however, that the student of psychology who affirms that there are no facts and laws of man's mental life which lie forever outside of the prov- ince to which the formulas of mathematics can be made to apply, or who seeks for a method of studying mental life that shall dispense with its essential characteristic, so far as known or know- able by us, of being conscious and self-conscious, has set his limitations well beyond the boundaries of mental sanity. To apply mathematical laws inexorably to the beliefs of art, morals and re- ligion, does not serve to raise these beliefs to a place within the category of knowledge — where an- other method of treating them may, perhaps, place them. It serves, the rather, to incapacitate the individual knower with respect to his ability to apprehend truly the bare facts of such beliefs. On the other hand, the triumphal path of science is strewn with the remains of declarations about the possible and impossible for human knowledge, [130] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE which have already been altogether transcended. It is only a few years since the atom of modern chemistry appeared to be what its name signifies that it ought to be, — namely, the smallest ele- ment of material reality, which by no known means could be cut in two or otherwise made many. But we now know that every old- fashioned chemical atom is a system of innumer- able much more minute elements; and these even we seem right on the verge of being able to make visible to eyes equipped with the requisite apparatus. Only a little longer ago, it seemed certain that we should never sound the depths or map the shape of our physical universe. In a remoter past, the depths and the shape were thought to be discernible by the eyes of the star- gazer, be he only some shepherd of the upland or the plain. But now with telescope and spectro- scope the utmost and the hopeful efforts of the world's greatest astronomers are bent on de- termining within certain allowable limitations for error, how vast and how shaped our Universe really is and what are the physical laws which it has been following in its myriads of evolution. Or, to take more vulgar examples. It was never going to be possible to cross the ocean in steamships, just as it now seems impossible that we should ever conquer its dangers by crossing it in the air. Railroad trains were never to run with safety, at least with a rate of more than ten or twelve miles an hour. Coming back again to [131] WHAT CAN I KNOW? the history of science, we may recall the fact that the great physiologist Johannes Miiller, only about seventy-five years ago, declared that we should never know the speed of the nerve-current, since its speed was comparable with the speed of light. But seven years later, Helmholtz demon- strated the speed of the nerve-current in the leg of a frog and thus led the way to all the later knowledge on this matter acquired by the science of nerve-physiology. To turn the problem around once more and look at it again from the reverse point of view. No doubt not a few of the claims of men of science, and as well the statements of the reporters of in- terviews with men of science, as published in the newspapers, encourage the belief that we shall one day know what is intrinsically unknowable. We may enlarge the magnifying power of our micro- scopes and telescopes and devise iudefinitely finer gratings to assist in spectroscopic analysis. But we shall never see the essentially invisible, or even properly imagine it in terms of visualization. We shall never hear the intrinsically inaudible with improved telephones; we shall never touch more surely, or handle with more delicate fingers, the forever intangible. We shall never grasp with the intellect that which is by its nature unthink- able. We shall never stand face-to-face in in- tuition with an object that does not present toward us a face essentially like our own. Each thing will be known, if known at all, in its own [132] DEGREES AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE proper way. It will be known by man only as it is knowable to man. The mind, however much it may develop, will always set its own limitations. But within those limitations it will constantly increase the domain and heighten the degrees of its knowledge. [133] CHAPTER VI WHAT MAY THE KNOWER TAKE FOR GRANTED? W "WWF yHENEVER the human mind assumes the critical attitude toward its own faculties, a curious circle in the argument inevitably results. The condition of perplexity somewhat resembles that of the imfor- tunate man who, having all his life long unswerv- ingly believed in the trustworthiness of dreams, one night dreamed the doubt, — that all dreams are, on the contrary, untrue. For how shall the mind, otherwise than by exercising its power to know the truth with a confidence in its deliver- ances when critically employed, learn what is the ultimate truth in regard to the truthfulness of this power? Critical activity and activity criticized must always be subject to the same limitations; they must operate, whether in the production of truth or falsehood, under the same laws. Or, as was said when considering the limits of knowledge in the last Chapter, "The essential nature of man's knowing faculty limits his knowledge"; and "No guaranty of the trustworthiness of knowledge can be found outside of this same faculty." [134] TAKING FOR GRANTED From a slightly different point of view, however, we seem warranted in affirming that no other use of man's faculty of knowing is so utterly beyond the intellects of the lower animals, in a way so godlike, as the use made of it in the attempt at self-criticism. We may marvel at the intelligence of the trained horse or dog; and even more at the skill and precision with which what we, in our ignorance call "instinct," has endowed the ant and the bee. We may even suspect a kind of divine cunning in the roots and tendrils of certain plants, not to speak of the marvellous per- formances of amoeboid bodies like the spermato- zoon or the white blood-corpuscle. But we never for an instant have the remotest suspicion that any animal has proposed, or ever will pro- pose, or by any amount of training can be made capable of proposing, to itself or to others of its species, the problem of the Critique of Pure Reason. No other activity, human or divine, can be conceived of, that affords a ground for confidence ia the essential trustworthiness of man's knowledge, which is comparable with the proof that hes implicit in the power of self-criticism. The ability to doubt, and to examine the reasons for doubt, is the counterpart of the ability to know. Only the right to be agnostic constitutes the knower as a judge of truth; but the complete agnostic is self-judged as guilty of high trea- son in the court of Reason, divine as well as human. [135] WHAT CAN I KNOW? We have just spoken of the curious circle of argument into which the mind is thrown by the result, and even by the bare proposal, of an unsparing and fundamental criticism of its faculty of knowledge. This circle may be traced in out- line through the entire history of reflective think- ing; but its path has been tramped into plainness and marked out by not infrequent guide-boards, since the modern critical philosophy made the issue of the journey so clear. How can we have any system of metaphysics, any scientific or religious theory of the origins and essential nature of Reality, as long as we do not know whether man's reason is level with the task of propounding or comprehending such a system or theory? But, those who see clearly that all scientific as well as religious theories are inextricably interwoven with fundariiental beliefs; that even the most or- dinary and necessary forms of knowledge, whether they concern the nature or the uses of things, are shot through and through with instinctive metaphysics; and that the mind cannot possi- bly shake oflF, or see the other side of, the assump- tion that its knowledge is all of reality, — those who see clearly these truths, ask this question: How can you criticise human reason in essential freedom from the constitutional forms, the en- forced assumptions, and the indubitable faiths, of this same human reason? We only employ figures of speech which have been already conse- crated by a century or more of philosophical [136] TAKING FOR GRANTED squabbling, when we view this circle in the spirit of laughter. How dare one try to swim until one knows the specific gravity of the human body as measured by the standard of a cubic foot of water, and has thoroughly mastered the psycho- physical apparatus that must be set into operation in the dangerous activity of swimming, and perhaps, has also experienced something worth while of the emotional side, the feelings of fear and joy and pride which are likely to be called up by a venture over-head in stormy waters? In a word, how dare one try to swim in a fluid that may not bear one up; that — we grant — allures, but will probably forthwith strangle you? But, say the other school, the thinkers who believe in metaphysics; How shall man learn to swim if he does not go somewhat boldly into the water? And do we not ia fact find that even human babies, when thrown into the water show something notable of the swimming instinct; just as they do of the creeping instinct when laid on their bellies on the floor? With the more refined use of a figvire of speech, Lotze has com- pared those who insist on a finished and uni- versally accepted theory of Knowledge, before they will undertake the construction of a system of metaphysics as a theory of Reality, to the players in an orchestra who should be forever tuning their instruments before they ventured upon the attempt to play a tune. Now the only sensible and serviceable inter- [137] WHAT CAN I KNOW? pretation of all this, so far as the contention has any truth to tell us about the problem before us, is not at all hard to discover. Criticism and use of the human faculty of knowing have always advanced together in a sort of mutual depen- dence, if not actually with even pace and hand in hand. The mind of man knows better what it really knows, the more it learns by self-criticism what it really can know. In the history of the development of speculative philosophy, episte- mology or the critical theory of knowledge, and metaphysics or the carefully criticized theory of reality, have advanced according to the serious and respectful consideration which each has vouchsafed to the other. And the glorious orchestra of the positive sciences, as the numerous players in it learn better how to tune and use the many new instruments which are being intro- duced, make fuller and more inspiring harmonies in description and in praise of the Orderly and Sublime Whole, the Universe, as it really exists and actually behaves. Nor do we think that to the common mind, at least when it becomes interested in the question. What can I know? all reflection ought to be denied over the related question: What things may I take for granted in all my attempts to grow in knowledge? Every knower is entitled to sample some of the extracts from the crushing press of the critical philosophy. The things to be taken for granted in all human knowledge may be somewhat roughly divided into [138] TAKING FOR GRANTED two classes. There are, first those things which must be taken for granted by every knower whether he will or no; and there are, second, those things which every knower may quite reasonably mil to take for granted. In every kind and act of knowledge there are some things which the knower is compelled to take for granted. He may not be conscious of the compulsion, or he may be very keenly and even painfully conscious of it. He may regard the compulsion as a privilege, as indeed a share in the way in which God himself knows, with his infallible intuition, that things really are; or he may regard the compulsion as a species of slavery, as a trick of a jealous Providence to exclude man forever from a share in divine, infallible insight into the hidden truth of Reality, or even as the scheme, baffing the noblest intellectual aspira- tions of humanity, enacted and enforced by a malignant demon. But aU this makes not the slightest difference with the result as a con- trolling law for the knower. The particular sciences have for centuries recognized with considerable precision certain so-called axioms or postulates, the truth of which must be assumed as bases or points of starting for all their advances into more distant fields of knowledge. This is especially obvious in the science of mathematics in all its main branches. In arithmetic and the arithmetical forms of mathematics, the vahdity of that complex faculty [139] WHAT CAN I KNOW? which makes man able to count and to compare and manipulate numbers ascertained by the process of counting, is taken for granted as applicable to all real things and actual events so far as their quantity and quantitative relations are concerned. Man's numbering of things and forces is knowledge that rests upon the assumption that things and forces are really numerable. Again, that admirable example of compact logical demonstration, the Euclidean geometry, makes it a part of its task, preliminary to all its reason- ing and as a guaranty for it all, to set forth an elaborate system of axioms and postulates, or things taken for granted. Among such, a notable instance is the postulate concerning parallel lines. To say that parallel lines never meet is no better than to utter the childish truism: lines that do not meet do not meet. But let us throw the postulate into the form of a problem and declare: If on the straight line AB, we erect at any dis- tance two straight lines, AC and BD, at right angles with the line AB, and lying in the same plane, and then measure oflf upon them the same distances and connect by a straight line the points C and D, then the line CD, which measures the distance between the lines AC and BD will be of the same length, no matter how far the lines AC and BD are produced. This proposi- tion, however, centuries of mathematical experts have failed to demonstrate, although no one of them has had any doubt as to its abstract truth. [140] TAKING FOE GRANTED Every carpenter and mason and surveyor, who uses square and nile or tape and theodolyte, takes for granted the same truth when applied to the measurement of things. All the positive sciences, in their dealings with the quantities, sizes, distances, weights, etc., of the objects which they observ-e and investigate, assume the right to apply the mathematics of number and of geometry to these objects. But this is not all that is taken for granted. It is the extension of things, their comparative sizes and distances in space, and the length of the time it takes for changes in the character and the rela- tions of things, and the order of the succession of events, to which the principles of measuring and numbering are assumed truthfully to apply. But things could not be distinguished, could not therrfore be either nimibered or have their limits determined, much les^ could they be grouped in dasses and given common names, so as to make recognition of them possible, and communication about them possible between different indi^"iduals and generations, unless things had really differeat modes of behavior. That these different modes of behavior, or quahties in action, really belong to the things is also a truth which must be taken for granted; otherwise we could not attain any knowledge of j>arti