Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/310

 296 JOHN DEWEY: and in its relation) the subject, or consciousness, to which to relate the immediate. 1 But we need not remain with dogmatic assertions. To be acquainted with a thing or with a person has a definite empirical meaning ; we have only to call to mind what it is to be genuinely and empirically acquainted, to have done for ever with this uncanny presence which, though bare and simple presence, is yet known, and thus is clothed upon and complicated. To be acquainted with a thing is to be assured (from the standpoint of the experience itself) that it is of such and such a character ; that it will behave, if given an opportunity, in such and such way ; that the obviously and flagrantly present trait is associated with fellow traits which will show themselves, if the leadings of the present trait are followed out. To be acquainted is to some extent, on the basis of prior experience, to anticipate. I am, say, barely acquainted with Mr. Smith : then I have no extended body of associated qualities along with those palpably present, but at least some one suggested trait occurs ; his nose, his tone of voice, the place where I saw him, his calling in life, an interesting anecdote about him, etc. To be acquainted is to know what a thing is like in some particular. If one is acquainted with the smell of a flower it means that the smell is not just smell, but reminds one of some other experienced thing which stands in continuity with the smell. There is thus supplied a condition of control of or purchase upon what is present, the possibility of translating it into terms of some other trait not now sensibly present. Let us return to our example. Let us suppose that S is not just displaced by K and then by G. Let us suppose it persists ; and persists not as an unchanged S alongside K and G, nor yet as fused with them into a new further quale J. For in such events, we have only the type already con- sidered and rejected. The new quale might be for an observer more complex, or fuller of meaning, than the original S, K or G, but might not be experienced as complex. We might thus suppose a composite photograph which would suggest 1 If Hume had had a tithe of the interest in the mode and operation of the flux of perceptions (that he carelessly proclaimed and then abandoned as a merely negative thing, useful to drown dogmatists in), which he had in distinct and isolated existences, he might have saved us both from German Erkenntnisstheorie, and from that modern miracle play, the psychology of elements of consciousness, which under the aegis of science, does not hesitate to have psychical elements compound and breed, and in their agile intangibility put to shame the performances of their less acrobatic cousins, physical atoms.