Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/271

 tain, or on account of its fragmentary, unsatisfactory character) he must assume the existence of metaphysical entities "behind" the empirical facts. These facts point to something beyond experience; we know that they point to it, but we cannot know what they are pointing to. In short, we are confronted with the old dualism of phaenomena or appearances on one side, and things in themselves, or reality on the other, and the agnostic doctrine is, that the latter must forever remain hidden from our minds.

It is easy to disclose the fallacies of this views. In the first place it rests on that confusion of knowledge and intuition which is the cause of the most typical failures in philosophy. For the chief characteristic of what is called "appearance" or "phaenomenon" is its immediacy, it is given intuitively, it is content, and as long as one believes that knowledge consists in the presence or expression of content one must maintain that only "phaenomena" can be known.

We need not lose a word about this fundamental mistake: for us there can be no doubt that the presence of content is not the slightest reason why the "phaenomenon" should be better known than the thing in itself of which the content is not given. The knowledge of a phaenomenon is something entirely different from the intuition of its content.

In the second place, it is contradictory to say that the data of experience allow us to infer the existence but not the nature of things beyond experience. For, as I said before, it is nonsense to assert the existence of something without knowing what we assert the existence of. The same reasons which lead us to think that there are certain things there, must be sufficient to ascribe certain propositions to those things. If it seems necessary to assume the existence of unperceived entities it can be only because they are needed to fill certain places or functions. To assert therefore, that they exist, is to assert that they fill their places and have their functions. And this means that we can predicate of them just as much as we can of anything else, we have knowledge of them, our propositions reveal their structure just as they do in the case of "appearances", the content of the latter does not enter into our propositions either, and thus there is no difference between the two cases as far as knowledge is concerned.

The same reasoning can be expressed in this way: If the "phaenomena" are appearances of something else, then the mere fact that this "something