Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/38

22 'Logic' has come to be used, that there is any excuse for a separate term for the philosophical investigation of the conditions of knowledge. If logic be supposed to deal with consistency only, the question of truth (i.e., the question how knowledge is possible)—a question which Aristotle certainly dealt with in his Analytics—seems to require a separate science to deal with it. But this distinction between consistency and truth cannot be maintained as an absolute distinction. How, e.g., can we use the argument per impossibile, which we do use even in the most abstract mathematics and in the most purely formal logic, unless we hold that the inconceivability of the opposite is the test of truth? To speak of truth or knowledge as being the correspondence of thought to things is to fall back upon a metaphor and to adopt from popular language a theory of knowledge which only states the problem it professes to solve. The distinction between my thought and reality is a perfectly valid and a very important distinction; but it affords no grounds for the opinion that reality in its ultimate nature can be some- thing quite other than thought. Reality is objectivity, i. e.,coherence in thought for myself, and—wherever I can apply this test also—coherence of my thought with that of others. So far as our feelings are concerned, we are each of us shut up in 'closed spheres'; but it is for that very reason that mere feelings do not constitute knowledge (though there may be knowledge of them). I have, therefore, taken it for granted that in a discussion about epistemology the world of consciousness referred to was the world of thought, or of feelings only as interpreted and transmuted by thinking. It is only the ratio of our feelings to one another that admits of comparison with what others experience. I can never know, for instance, that what I call a red color gives you the same feeling that it gives me; but I am satisfied, if I find that I distinguish red from green and other colors in the same sort of way in which you and other persons do (not being the color-blind minority—whose judgment I do not accept, simply because their judgments of identity and difference do not fit in with those of the majority