第27章

The dualism of Object and Subject and their pre-established harmony are what the psychologist as such must assume, whatever ulterior monistic philosophy he may, as an individual who has the right also to be a metaphysician, have in reserve.I hope that this general point is now made clear, so that we may leave it, and descend to some distinctions of detail.

There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable:

we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about.

Most languages express the distinction; thus, g n v n a i , e i d e n a i ; noscere, scire; kennen, wissen;

connaître, savoir. I am acquainted with many people and things, which I know very little about, except their presence in the places where I have met them.I know the color blue when I see it, and the flavor of a pear when I taste it; I know an inch when I move my finger through it;

a second of time, when I feel it pass; an effort of attention when I make it; a difference between two things when I notice it; but about the inner nature of these facts or what makes them what they are, I can say nothing at all.I cannot impart acquaintance with them to any one who has not already made it himself.I cannot describe them, make a blind man guess what blue is like, define to a child a syllogism, or tell a philosopher in just what respect distance is just what it is, and differs from other forms of relation.At most, I can say to my friends, Go to certain places and act in certain ways, and these objects will probably come.All the elementary natures of the world, its highest genera, the simple qualities of matter and mind, together with the kinds of relation that subsist between them, must either not be known at all, or known in this dumb way of acquaintance without knowledge-about.In minds able to speak at all there is, it is true, some knowledge about everything.Things can at least be classed, and the times of their appearance told.But in general, the less we analyze a thing, and the fewer of its relations we perceive, the less we know about it and the more our familiarity with it is of the acquaintance-type.

The two kinds of knowledge are, therefore, as the human mind practically exerts them, relative terms.That is, the same thought of a thing may be called knowledge-about it in comparison with a simpler thought, or acquaintance with it in compari- son with a thought of it that is more articulate and explicit still.

The grammatical sentence expresses this.Its 'subject' stands for an object of acquaintance which, by the addition of the predicate, is to get something known about it.We may already know a good deal, when we hear the subject named - its name may have rich connotations.But, know we much or little then, we know more still when the sentence is done.We can relapse at will into a mere condition of acquaintance with an object by scattering our attention and staring at it in a vacuous trance-like way.We can ascend to knowledge about it by rallying our wits and proceeding to notice and analyze and think.What we are only acquainted with is only present to our minds; we have it, or the idea of it.But when we know about it, we do more than merely have it; we seem, as we think over its relations, to subject it to a sort of treatment and to operate upon it with our thought.The words feeling and thought give voice to the antithesis.Through feelings we become acquainted with things, but only by our thoughts do we know about them.Feelings are the germ and starting point of cognition, thoughts the developed tree.The minimum of grammatical subject, of objective presence, of reality known about, the mere beginning of knowledge, must be named by the word that says the least.Such a word is the interjection, as lo! there! ecco! voilà! or the article or demonstrative pronoun introducing the sentence, as the , it , that.In Chapter XII we shall see a little deeper into what this distinction, between the mere mental having or feeling of an object and the thinking of it, portends.