Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 11.djvu/622

* KNOWLEDGE. 562 KNOWLEDGE. which demand is iiiude by thought. In other words, when doubt arises as to tlio validity of any intellectual process, and when in order to remove this doubt we appeal to senseexpericiice, it is only as thinlcing beings and in accordance with the laws of thought that we inter|)ret the results of the appeal. Thought may not muke reality, but wit'iout thought there can l)e no recognition of reality. But here again an objection will probably be raised. It will be said that psychology shows sense-consciousness to lune e.visted long before thought appeared on the scene. Thought is a new-comer; sense is as old as consciousness it- self. Granted the truth of this objection, what follows? Merely that psychology as a science laboriously wrought out by much comparative (:= thinking) observation ot conscious experi- ence, discloses the temporal priority of sense to thought. Notwithstanding all this, more sense- experience cannot be experience of reality if by reality is meant what ice knoii: as reality; for reality with us is what it is only by virtue of contrasts which thought has made. If we there- fore maintain, on the basis of psychological rev- elations, that many aninuils know reality without having that knowledge mediated l>y thought, it must also be maintained that tli;it knowledge of reality is something so utterly milike vur human knowledge, that nolliing liut confusion comes of calling the two things by the same name. But, it may be saiil in rejoinder, we human beings experience soniething like that un- thinking appreliension of reality. Sometimes in us thought-activity seems entirely suspended and only a sense-consciousness can be discovered in our mental ])rocesses. In extreme lassitude of body and mind, may we not lie on the grass and look up at the sky and drink in reality without a single act of thought? Yes and no. The answer depends on what is meant by thought. Some psy- chologists nowadays make a distinction between thought processes and association processes. Trains of images that follow each other without any experience of self-activity arc called associa- tion-trains. Those that are accompanied by rec- ognized self-activity are called thought trains. If thought is thus discriminated from association, it must be confessed that we can have experiences without thought. But after all. what is this self- activity? It seems to be nothing but sensations of tendinous strain and articular movement. The distinction thus made between association and thought turns out to be a distinction between association of ideas without a sense of strain and association with a sense of strain. Why any sense of strain accompanying a process should have any signific.ince as regards the validity of the process is difTicult to discover. A more significant distinction between associa- tion and thought is that between the characters of the connections involved. Assnciat ion-connections arc random; there is no internal logical consis- tency. An unknown dog may suggest a familiar cat. and the latter may by some queer freak of association call up the word catastrophe, and the image of some horrible experience. In this mere association-process each step taken is ex- plicable b}' the inniiliar laws of association, but there is no logical coherence between the first step and the last. The iinknown dog and the fatal railway wreck do not belong together. On the other hand, in thought-processes the whole series from beginning to end is controlled by some central interest. The linal stage of the process is as closely connected with the initial stage as with the intervening stages. . the ideas tra- versed in the movement form a consistent whole. Such a thought-process completely domi- nated by some single interest is not frequent, (ienerally our thoughts are only loosely con- nected; we break the continuity of the train and then reconnect the broken ends. Sometimes the breaks are rare; sometimes they are annoy- ingly frequent. There is no hard and fast line of ilillerence between association and thought. Very little of our thinking is absolutely direct and altogether pertinent. The diirerence between asso- ciation and thought is one of degree. Association is loose-jointed and random thinking; thought is compact and coherent association. If this is so, we may say that tlicre is no experience that we can conceive from which thought is absent; and that so far from its being true that the less thought there is, the more reality, it is rather the reverse which is true. The more coherence and consistency there is between all the parts of our sense-experience, the more sure we are of their reality. The better our thinking, the nearer we are to reality, provided of course we have some sense-content in our thinking. Mere think- ing would be of no more value, if it really could exist, than mere sense. We never get at such reality as we know without thought upon sense- data. In this cooperation of thought and sense toward the production of knowledge of reality, it cannot be said that sense is nearer to reality than thought. Neither is nearer than the other any Tuore than the father is nearer to the child l)y procreation than the mother, or I'ice rersa. Only one more objection to the validity of knowledge can be considered here. After all, it will be urged, we have knowledge of reality only by means of ideas or sensations, which are them- selves not the reality. Hence there is always the possibility that our means are defective inasmuch as we can never get directly at the object known, in order to compare it with our sensations and ideas. We have to assume the validity of knowl- edge, it is conceded ; but we must, it is urged, realize that it is, when all is said, a gigantic assumption, or simply a working hypothesis. We can never knom that we really know, although wo must always take that knowledge for granted. This objection, although very popular at present, is as futile as all the others we have examined, for if it is a valid objection, it must be backed by reasons. These reasons can be stated in the words of Prof. Karl Pearson: "How close then can we actually get to this supposed world out- side ourselves? -lust as near as but no neai-er than the brain terminals of the sensory nerves. We are like the clerk in the central telephone ex- change who cannot get nearer to his customers than his end of the telephone wires. We are in- deed worse ofT than the clerk, for to carry out the analog}' properly we must suppose him neoer to have been outside the telephone exchange, never to have seen a customer, or ani/ one like a ciis- tomrr — in short, never, except through the tele- phone wire, to have come in contact with the outside universe. . . . Very much in the posi- tion of such a telephone clerk is the conscious rgo of each one of us seated at the brain ter- minals of the sensory nerves. Not a step nearer than these terminals can the ego get to the 'outer