Page:Immediate Experience and Mediation.djvu/11

Rh contrasting them with the 'mediate' or reflective experiences of, e.g., the critic, the theologian, or the metaphysician.

The experiences here called 'immediate' belong to a level below, or at least other than, that of truth and falsity, in any strict sense of those terms, and are contrasted with experiences to which the distinction between true and false inevitably and naturally applies. If we speak of a 'true' instinct, a 'sound' or 'healthy' feeling of distrust, a 'true' sense of beauty or of the divine, our use of such epithets is proleptic. The 'true' instinct is one which may be converted into a reasoned knowledge. The 'sound' or 'healthy' feeling will approve itself on rational grounds, though, when thus approved, it will have passed into a form of experience which is more (even if it is also less) than feeling. And the 'true' sense of beauty or of the divine is strictly 'true' only when transformed into a philosophical theory.

If, therefore, our mediate experience or our knowledge is 'grounded' on what is thus immediate, the relation, whatever else it may be, is clearly not a logical dependence. The mediate experience is not related to the immediate as conclusion to premiss, or as logical consequent to logical antecedent. We do not know that A is a thief because we distrust him. We might, indeed, be tempted to view the Immediate as 'grounded upon' the Mediate. For the proof of A's guilt has converted our feeling into a reasoned distrust; the movement of Rh