Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/308

 294 JOHN DEWEY: starts changes which end in picking and enjoying a rose. This description is intended to apply to the course of events witnessed and recounted from without. What sort of a course must it be to constitute a knowledge, or to have somewhere within its career that which deserves this title ? The smell, imprimis, is in consciousness; the movements that it excites are in consciousness ; the final plucking and grati- fication are experienced. But, let us say, the smell is not the smell of the rose ; the resulting change of the organism is not a sense of walking and reaching ; the delicious finale is not the fulfilment of the movement, and, through that, of the original smell: 'is not,' in each case meaning is 'not experienced as ' ; is not so directly in consciousness. We may take, in short, these experiences in a brutely serial fashion. The smell, S, is replaced (and displaced) by a felt movement, K, this is replaced by the gratification, G. Viewed from without, as we are now regarding it, there is S-K-G. But from within, for itself, it is now S, now K, now G, and so on to the end of the chapter. Nowhere is there looking before and after ; memory and anticipation are not born. Such an Experience neither is, in whole or in part, a knowledge, nor jdoes it anywhere exercise a cognitive function. Here, however, we may be halted. If there is anything -present in consciousness at all, we may be told (at least we constantly are so told) there must be knowledge of it as present either in a world of things, or, at all events, in least of the simple apprehensive type, knowledge of the acquaintance order, knowledge that even though not know- ledge what. The smell, it is admitted, does not know about anything else, nor is anything known about the smell (the same thing, perhaps); but the smell is known, either by itself, or by the mind, or by some subject, some unwinking, unremitting eye. No, we must reply ; there is no appre- hension without some (however slight) comprehension ; no acquaintance which is not either recognition or expectation. Acquaintance is presence honoured also with an escort ; presence is introduced as familiar, or an associate springs up to greet it. Acquaintance always implies a little friend- liness ; a trace of re-knowing, of anticipatory welcome or dread of the trait to follow. This claim cannot be dismissed as trivial. If valid, it carries with it the immense distance of being and knowing : and the recognition of an element of mediation, that is, of art, in all knowledge. This disparity, this transcendence, is not something which holds of our knowledge, of finite knowledge,
 * consciousness '. There is, so it is argued, knowledge at