Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/230

 from the outside and in this way falsifying our knowledge, whereas the only true method of discovering what water really is consisted in identifying one's self with it. Schopenhauer believed that if he did this he would find out that water was nothing but Will, and Bergson assures us that it would disclose itself as élan vital. Can we accept such statements? If we really turned into water, we should be water, but it seems to me that this does not mean we should know what water is. Does gold know the nature of gold? does light know the nature of light?

Intuition, identification of mind with an object is not knowledge of the object and does not help towards it, because it does not fulfil the purpose by which knowledge is defined: this purpose is to find our way among the objects, to predict their behaviour, and that is done by discovering their order, by assigning to every object its proper place within the structure of the world. Identification with a thing does not help us to find its order, but prevents us from it. Intuition is enjoyment, enjoyment is life, not knowledge. If you say that it is ever so much more important than knowledge I shall not contradict you, but it is perhaps all the more reason not to confuse it with knowledge (which has an importance of its own).

We found the most essential feature of knowledge in the fact that it requires two terms: one that is known, and one as which it is known. But in intuition we have only one term: when we lose ourselves in the enjoyment of the blue sky, there is "blue" and nothing else. This is the reason, too, why the content of intuition cannot be expressed, whereas expressibility is an essential not an accidental property of knowledge.

The mystic who maintains that intuition is the highest form of knowing is condemned to absolute silence; he cannot communicate his vision, he would commit a self-contradiction if in his books or sermons he tried to describe his "knowledge", although he could, of course, explain in what condition and circumstances he was when the intuition came to him, and what he did in order to get into this condition.

If we recapitulate in the shortest possible manner the chief points of contrast between intuition and real knowledge we get the following table.