Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/183

No. 2.] though the difference may seem so slight as to be almost imperceptible, and the danger that lurks in it is probably only apparent to us in the light of subsequent events. "Since the mind," says Locke, "in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them." – So, again, in the opening of Chapter II, he repeats that all our knowledge consists "in the view the mind has got of its own ideas." Now it is one thing to say that the mind knows things only by the intervention or by means of the ideas it has of them, and another thing to say that ideas constitute the "immediate object" of the mind, and that "our knowledge is only conversant about" ideas. The last is so far from being true that it might be more correct to say that our knowledge is never conversant about ideas – ideas never constitute the object of the mind at all – unless in the reflective analysis of the psychologist. Otherwise, our knowledge is always conversant about realities of some kind; to say that we know by means of ideas is simply to say that we know; but ideas are naught except as signs of a further reality, and from the first they are taken not per se, but in this symbolic capacity. As Locke himself puts it in his excellent chapter on the Reality of Human Knowledge, "It is the knowledge of things that is only to be prized ... If our knowledge of our ideas terminate in them and reach no farther ... our most serious thoughts will be of little more use than the reveries of a crazy brain." – Locke's shifting statements show us, indeed, "the psychologist's fallacy" in full blast. If we once yield ourselves to his first line of thought; if we admit a start from ideas per se, a custom-woven, private, ideal phantasmagoria will be our only substitute for the common or objective world of real persons and things. We get a theory of Representative Perception that is totally indefensible; the ideas are taken as really intervening between the mind and things; the mechanism of knowledge is converted into an elaborate means of defeating its own purpose. It becomes a tertium quid, a kind of screen which effectually shuts off the knower from what he