Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/228

 ultimate meaning of all our words and symbols. A definition gives the meaning of a term by means of other words, these can again be defined by means of still other words, and so on until we arrive at terms that no longer admit of a verbal definition — the meaning of these must be given by direct acquaintance: one can learn the meaning of the words "joy" or "green" only by being joyful or by seeing green. Thus the final understanding and interpretation of a proposition seems to be reached only in those acts of intuition — is it not through them, therefore, that the real knowledge which the proposition expresses is ultimately attained?

The considerations in our first lecture have taught us already to what extent these remarks are true. We saw that our ordinary verbal language must be supplemented by pointing to objects and presenting them in order to make our words and sentences a useful means of communication, but we saw at the same time that in this way we were only explaining our language of words by a language of gestures, and that it would be a mistake to think that by this method our words were really linked to the content which intuition is supposed to provide for us. We showed that the meaning of our words was contained entirely in the structure of the intuitive content. So it is not true that the latter (the inexpressible greenness of the green), which only intuition can furnish, actually enters into the understanding of knowledge. It cannot possibly do so.

Besides, — and this remark settles the question independently of all other considerations — the fact that intuition, immediate awareness, or as we should rather say, the mere presence of content, is indispensable for all knowledge, this fact has no significance whatsoever, for it is indispensable for everything; it is the ineffable ever present fundament of all else, also of knowledge, but this does not mean that it is itself knowledge — on the contrary, it makes it impossible to apply to it the word knowledge, which is reserved for something utterly different.

(When I look at the blue sky and lose myself in the contemplation of it without thinking that I am enjoying the blue, I am in a state of pure intuition, the blue fills my mind completely, they have become one, it is the kind of union of which the mystic dreams. Bergsonian intuition is the mystical conception of knowledge. Shall we not say that through the state of pure awareness which I just described we come to know what "blue" really