KNOWLEDGE
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KNOWLEDGE
III. The Problem op Knowledge. — The question
of knowledge belongs to various sciences, each of
which takes a different point of view. Psychology
considers knowletlge as a mental fact whose elements,
conditions, laws, and growth are to be determined.
It endeavours to discover the behaviour of the mind in
knowing, and the development of the cognitive proc-
ess out of its elements. It supplies the other sciences
with the data on which they must work. Among
these data are found certain laws of thought which the
mind must oljserve in order to avoid contradiction and
to reach consistent knowledge. Formal logic also
takes the subjective point of view; it deals with these
laws of thought, and, neglecting the objective side of
knowledge (that is, its materials), studies only the
formal elements necessary to consistency and valid
proof. At the other extreme, science, physical or
metaphysical, postulating the validity of knowledge,
or at least leaving this problem out of consideration,
studies only the different objects of knowledge, their
nature and properties. As to the crucial questions, the
vaUdity of knowledge, its hmitations, and the rela-
tions between the knowing subject and the known
object, these belong to the province of epistemology
Knowledge is essentially objective. Such names as the "given" or the "content" of knowledge may be substituted for that of "object", but the plain fact remains that we know something external, which is not formed by, but offered to, the mind. This must not, however, cause us to overlook another fact equally evident. Different minds will frequently take different views of the same object. Moreover, even in the same mind, knowledge undergoes great changes in the course of time; judgments are constantly modi- fied, enlarged or narrowed down, in accordance with newly discovered facts and ascertained truths. Sense- perception is influenced by past processes, associations, contrasts, etc. In rational knowledge a great diver- sity of assents is produced by personal dispositions, innate or acquired. In a word, knowledge clearly depends on the mind. Hence the assertion that it is made by the mind alone, that it is conditioned exclu- sively by the nature of the thinking subject, and that the object of knowledge is in no way outside of the knowing mind. To use Berkeley's words, to be is to be known (esse est percipi). The fact of the depend- ence of knowledge upon subjective conditions, how- ever, is far from sufficient to justify this conclusion. Men agree on many propositions, both of the empirical and of the rational order; they differ not so much on objects of knowledge as on objects of opinion, not so much on what they really know as on what they think they know. For two men with normal eyes, the vision of an object, as far as we can ascertain, is sen- sibly the same. For two men with normal minds, the proposition that the sum of the angles in a triangle equals two right angles has the same meaning, and, both for several minds and for the same mind at differ- ent times, the knowledge of that proposition is identi- cal. Owing to associations and differences in mental attitudes, the fringe of consciousness will vary and somewhat modify the total mental state, but the/oc»s of consciousness, knowledge it.self, will be essentially thesame. St Thomas will not be accused of idealism, and yet he makes the nature of the mind an essential factor in the act of knowledge: "Cognition is brought about by the presence of the known object in the knowing mind. But the object is in the knower after the fashion of the knower. Hence, for any knower, knowledge is after the fashion of his own nature" (Summa theol., I, Q. xii, a. 4). What is this presence of the object in the subject? Not a physical presence; not even in the form of a picture, a duplicate, or a copy. It cannot be defined by any eompaiison with the physical world; it is xui generis, a cognitive likeness, a species intentiimnlis.
When knowledge, either of concrete realities or of
abstract propositions, is said to consist in the presence
of an object in the mind, we cannot mean by this ob-
ject something e.xternal in its absolute existence and
isolated from the mind, for we cannot think outside
of our own thought, and the mind cannot know what
is not somehow present in the mind. But this is no
sufficient ground for accepting extreme ideahsm and
looking upon knowledge as purely subjective. If the
object of an assent or experience cannot be absolute
reality, it does not follow that to an assent or expe-
rience there is no corresponding reality; and the fact
that an object is reached through the conception of it
does not justify the conclusion that the mental con-
ception is the whole of the object's reality. To say
that knowledge is a conscious process is true, but it is
only a part of the truth. And from this to infer, with
Locke, that, since we can be conscious only of what
takes place within ourselves, knowledge is only "con-
versant with ideas ", is to take an exclusively psycho-
logical view of the fact which asserts itself primarily as
establishing a relation between a mind and an external
reality. Knowledge becomes conversant with ideas
by a subsequent process, namely by the reflection of
the mind upon its own activity. The subjectivist has
his eyes wide open to the difficulty of explaining the
transition from external reality to the mind, a diffi-
culty which, after all, is but the mystery of conscious-
ness itself. He keeps them obstinately closed to the
utter impossibility of explaining the building up by the
mind of an external reality out of mere conscious pro-
cesses. Notwithstanding all theorizing to the con-
trary, the facts impose themselves that in knowing the
mind is not merely active, but also passive; that it
must conform, not simply to its own laws, but to ex-
ternal reality as well; that it does not create facts and
laws, but discovers them; and that the right of truth
to recognition persists even when it is actually ignored
or violated. "The mind, it is true, contributes its share
to the knowing process, but, to use the metaphor of
St. Augustine, the generation of knowledge requires an-
other cause: " Whatever object we know is a co-factor
in the generation of the knowledge of it. For knowl-
edge is begotten both by the knowing subject and the
known object " (De Trinitate, IX, xii}. Hence it may
be maintained that there are realities distinct from
ideas without falling into the absurdity of maintain-
ing that they are known in their absolute existence,
that is apart from their relations to the knowing
mind. Knowledge is essentially the vital union of
both.
It has been said above that knowledge requires ex- perience and thought. The attempt to explain knowl- edge by experience alone proved a failure, and the favour which Associationism found at first was short- lived. Recent criticism of the sciences has accent- uated the fact, which already occupied a central place in scholastic philosophy, that knowledge, even of the physical and mental worlds, implies factors transceml- ing experience. Empiricism fails completely in its en- deavour to explain and justify universal knowledge, the knowledge of uniform laws under which facts are Ijrought to unity. Without rational additions, the perception of what is or has been can never give the knowledge of what will certainly and necessarily be. True as this is of the natural sciences, it is still more evident in abstract and rational sciences hke mathe- matics. Hence we are led back to the old Aristo- telean and Scholastic view, that all knowledge begins with concrete experience, but requires other factors, not given in experience, in order to reach its per- fection. It needs reason interpreting the data of ob- servation, abstracting the contents of experience from the conditions which individualize them in space and time, removing, as it were, the outer envelope of the concrete, and going to the core of reality. Thus knowledge is not, as in Kantian criticism, a synthesifi
