Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/564

 550 CRITICAL NOTICES : about them, so that the full fact emerges only with the full theory^ But the reply, true as it is, is off the point here. For the problem breaks out afresh within the meaning of fact, at whatever level of knowledge we take the facts. It is true that we can speak of the facts only as we know them ; it is true, also, that ideally and in principle there is no conflict between the nature of the facts and our knowledge of that nature. Reality, we may say, is as ice know it to be. But even so, reality never is our experience. All reflexion on knowledge, so far from closing the chasm, seems but to keep it wide agape. And that, I imagine, is the reason why we meet so frequently with appeals to 'immediate experience,' intui- tion, in short to some kind of unreflective union of the knowing mind with the object known. But reflective analysis seems to yield this result : I am aware of a 'fact,' I may be aware of it even 1 as it really is,' but for all that, my experience is not the fact. It is a fact of its own, different from the fact which is its object, ' about ' which it is. It is a qualification of my existence, it exists- as ' my ' experience. And yet it reveals to me the nature of some- thing else that exists or is real in the same sense in which I exist or am real. And that which thus exists remains distinct and ' independent '. The independence of reality, then, would appear to mean that it is not ' mine ' in the sense in which the experience of it is ' mine,' viz., as being a qualification of my existence. For, be it observed, the content of the experience does not qualify me (except where I am my own object) but qualifies the object. It is all paradoxical enough, even when we assume a condition of per- fect knowledge. But the paradox increases tenfold when we reflect, that our knowledge is not perfect, and that the content which qualifies the object may be ' true ' or ' false '. If it be false, we seem driven to say that the object must have a character of its- own which excludes and contradicts the character that our ex- perience attributes to it, and yet, at the same time, we must be unaware of this conflict. This is a point which Mr. Joachim rightly emphasises. The real sting of error lies in that we accept it as truth. In true experience the content of our experience and the character of the object are somehow identical, however hard we may find it to formulate this fact intelligibly. But in error this identity has disappeared without our being aware of the break. And when the discrepancy comes to be detected, and the error to be recognised as error, we cannot say that it was merely imperfect knowledge. For error is not merely lack of knowledge, it is, if I may be for- given the bull, false knowledge ; it contains elements not simply absorbed by the better insight. And this is the feature which it is so hard to account for, and the necessity of which is a problem which Mr. Joachim hands over without much hope, one suspects to Metaphysics. In fact, error is but the extremest form of the division between subject and object, which thus re-emerges at the end of the book as the fundamental problem still unsolved. As long as the division cannot be overcome, as long as knowledge is.