Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/245

 for poetry and life? I do not wish to reject such a formulation altogether, especially after having myself contrasted knowledge and form on one side with life and content on the other — but we have to be extremely careful not to fall into a severe misunderstanding here. In the first place, we must regard the statement as a mere hint, not as a real proposition — for otherwise it would say something about content, which we know to be impossible; secondly, it would be a frightful blunder to infer that because content, in a way, is life, it might be a wonderful advantage if it were possible to express content, and that it was a great pity for life that it is impossible. And a worse error is committed by those who think that inexpressibility of content is restricted to the methods of theoretical science only, and that the miracle might perhaps be achieved in some other way.

Among those who have seen with unusual clarity that knowledge deals with nothing but structural patterns is Prof. C.I. Lewis. When considering the possibility of two persons experiencing identically the same content, he writes (Mind and the World Order, p. 76): "For the rest, the question of such identity is, in the end, merely idle speculation because we have no possible means of investigating it." But here the phrase "idle speculation" seems much too weak for something in which there is no sense at all. In fact Prof. Lewis does not seem to think it altogether meaningless, for he says in another place (ibid., p. 112, note) : "The only reason that the possibility of such ineffable individual difference of immediacy is not altogether meaningless, is that we have interests which pass beyond those of cognition. Interests such as those of appreciation, sympathy, love, concern the absolute identity and quality as immediate of other experience than our own. Esthetics, ethics and religion are concerned with such interests which transcend those of action and knowledge [...]." In view of statements as these we must protest that aesthetics, ethics and religion can express the inexpressible no better than science can, whatever their methods of expression may be. For our arguments are based on the analysis of expression in general, without any restrictions, and must be valid for religion and poetry just as well as for theoretical physics.

Let us consider the case of the poet. Most people believe that he has the gift of expressing things that can be expressed by no other power — except perhaps by music, painting or sculpture, but certainly not by science or