Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/278

262 consists in showing that various seemings of every-day life are not true—that reality-feelings have attached themselves to various experiences that do not correspond to reality. But the seemings—the reality-feelings—remain in spite of our assent to the conclusions of science.

When Bain says that another primary assumption which we are obliged to make is our trust in present consciousness, I do not agree with him. "We must assume," he says, "that what we feel we do feel; that our sensations and feelings occur as they are felt." We do not assume that; we know it. When we come to tell what it is we feel; when we undertake to transform "knowledge of acquaintance into knowledge about;" when we forsake the point of view of Hodgson's "first intention" for that of his "second intention," doubt enters. But so long as we stick to the knowledge of acquaintance, we not only know but know so absolutely as to make it impossible for us to conceive of a higher or more trustworthy kind of knowledge. One would like to know what a man means by knowledge who says that he does not know that what he feels he does feel, that he only assumes it. Knowledge is a thing of which we have neither experience nor idea; it is for us a mere name without significance unless we are entitled to take our pretended knowledge that what we feel we do feel as an instance of it. But in so maintaining I do not contend for a universal "identification of knowing as a fact in the inner life of a subject with knowledge as the representation of a content known." Professor Robert Adamson says: "I believe it to be a real error in philosophical method to make the initial steps in a theory of knowledge from the Cartesian position, and am of opinion that the whole advance achieved by Kant is lost if we return, in dealing with the epistemological problem, to the identification of knowing as a fact in the inner life of a subject with knowledge as the representation of a content known."