Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/26

 enforcing this position. But Kant’s position is the converse of Berkeley’s, namely that significance is experience. Berkeley first analyses experience, and then expounds his view of its significance, namely that it is God conversing with us. For Berkeley the significance is detachable from the experience. It is here that Hume came in. He accepted Berkeley’s assumption that experience is something given, an impression, without essential reference to significance, and exhibited it in its bare insignificance. Berkeley’s conversation with God then becomes a fairy tale.

3.5 What is ‘significance’? Evidently this is a fundamental question for the philosophy of natural knowledge, which cannot move a step until it has made up its mind as to what is meant by this ‘significance’ which is experience.

‘Significance’ is the relatedness of things. To say that significance is experience, is to affirm that perceptual knowledge is nothing else than an apprehension of the relatedness of things, namely of things in their relations and as related. Certainly if we commence with a knowledge of things, and then look around for their relations we shall not find them. ‘Causal connection’ is merely one typical instance of the universal ruin of relatedness. But then we are quite mistaken in thinking that there is a possible knowledge of things as unrelated. It is thus out of the question to start with a knowledge of things antecedent to a knowledge of their relations. The so-called properties of things can always be expressed as their relatedness to other things unspecified, and natural knowledge is exclusively concerned with relatedness.

3.6 The relatedness which is the subject of natural