Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/37

Letter 3] touching and sucking instinct again revives, and as soon as it prevails over the recoiling instinct, I am impelled again towards the inkstand, not so rapidly as before, but still too rapidly. I recoil again, with pain lessened but still acute, I am acquiring "knowledge": I "know," though I cannot put it into words, that I have twice found the inkstand not-to-be-rapidly-approached-under-penalty-of-a-certain-kind-of-pain, in other words, "hard." But I try again; I try four, five, six times: I find that when I approach with less velocity my pain is less, and when with sufficiently diminished velocity, there is no pain at all; I touch and suck in peace: but when I forget my experience and suppose that the inkstand—even though I dash wildly at it after my old fashion—will "behave differently this time," I find that I am mistaken: the inkstand will not "behave differently"; it always behaves in the same way. By this time then I know something very important indeed.

But pause now, my friend, and ask yourself how much this infant has a right to say he "knows," so far as the evidence of the senses guides him. All that the senses have told him is that on five, six, seven, say even seventy, occasions, he found the inkstand hard. But is this all that he "knows"? You know perfectly well that he knows infinitely more: he has made a leap from the past into the future and knows that the inkstand will be found hard whenever he touches it. When he grows up and attains the power of speech he will generally express his knowledge in the Present Tense: "I must not strike the inkstand with my mouth for it is hard": but in reality this "is" implies "will be"; "I must not strike the inkstand with my mouth for I shall find it hard." Now what is it that has produced in him this conviction which no philosopher can justify by mere logic, but which every baby acts on? It seems to have arisen thus. The baby has