taking it seriously, on metaphysical ground. Knowledge professes to be knowledge of reality: and thus if we raise the question "How is knowledge possible?" or even the sceptical question "Is Knowledge possible at all?" we are ipso facto dealing with the question "What is reality—the only reality we ever can know or intelligently talk about?" We may, indeed, reserve the question "What is the full meaning of reality?" and we shall do well not to profess to give any but a provisional answer to it—such provisional answer constituting our speculative metaphysics, or 'philosophy' in the narrower and special sense.
The plain man certainly believes that, when he claims to know anything, he knows what is real; but I do not think he really believes this real world that he knows to be something outside his consciousness, however ready he may be to assent to the dualistic realism of so-called common-sense philosophy, which our realists in epistemology and our realists who try to do without epistemology alike tend to rehabilitate. Mr. Seth urges that knowledge, "if it is not an illusion altogether, is a knowledge of realities which are trans-subjective or extra-conscious; i.e., which exist beyond and independently of the consciousness of the individual knowing them."[1] That all knowledge is "trans-subjective," in the sense of having an objective reference, is undoubtedly true. Even my knowledge of my own mental states is trans-subjective, in the sense that there is a distinction between the knowing subject and the object known, as there must be in all knowledge. Such knowledge may also be called objective in the further sense that even my own mental states, though known directly to myself alone, are events in the real universe and are capable of becoming mediately an object of knowledge to other persons than myself, if I speak truthfully about them. But I am unable to see how a knowledge of my own mental states—and such knowledge both the plain man and the psychologist profess to have—can be described as "a knowledge of realities which exist beyond the consciousness of the individual knowing
- ↑ I, p. 505.
