Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/313

 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. 299 In other words, before there can properly be use of the idea of confirmation or refutation, there must be something which means to mean something and which therefore can be guaranteed or nullified by the issue and this is precisely what we have not as yet found. We must return to our instance and introduce a further complication. Let us sup- pose that the smell quale recurs at a later date, and that it recurs neither as the original S nor yet as the final 2, but as an S which is fated or charged with the sense of the possi- bility of a fulfilment like unto S. The S' which recurs is aware of something else which it means, which it intends to effect through an operation which it incites and without which its own presence is abortive, and, so to say, unjustified, senseless. Now we have an experience which is cognitional, not merely cognitive ; which is contemporaneously aware of meaning something beyond itself, instead of having this meaning ascribed by another or at a later period. The odour knows the rose ; the rose is known by the odour ; and the import of each term is constituted by the relationship in which it stands to the other. That is, the import of the smell is the intention- ally indicating and demanding relation which it sustains to the enjoyment of the rose as its fulfilling experience ; while this enjoyment is just the content or definition of what the smell consciously meant, i.e., meant to mean. The spectator or critic may decide that the smell is a feel- ing or state of consciousness or idea but in this case he is talking about smell in a different context, another thing, having another meaning in another situation his own cogni- tive problem as psychologist or whatever. But for itself the smell is a definite thing or quale which identifies itself with its intention securing another thing as its own fulfilment. And the enjoyed rose is not that of the artist or the botanist it is not the object of some other intention and problem, but is precisely the qualities meant or intended by this par- ticular smell. Subsequent fulfilment may increase this con- tent, so that the object or content of the rose as known will be other and fuller next time and so on. But we have no right to set up ' a rose ' at large or in general as the object of the knowing odour ; the object of knowledge is always strictly correlative to that particular thing which means it. It is not something which can be put in a wholesale way over against that which cognitively refers to it, as when the epistemologist puts the ' real ' rose (object) over against the merely phenomenal or empirical rose which this smell happens to mean. As the meaning gets more complex, fuller, more finely discriminated, the object which realises or fulfils the