Log24

“What is real?”
— Pope Benedict XVI
in Brazil on May 13

This suggests– via a search on “853-856” + “universals”– that we consult pages 853-856 in The Library of America’s William James: Writings 1902-1910.

Beginning on page 853 in this book, and ending on page 856, is an excerpt from a James address that the editor has titled…

The Tigers in India

“There are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively.  Altho such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically.

Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual knowledge, and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit here.  Exactly what do we mean by saying that we here know the tigers? ….

Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is having them, however absent in body, become in some way present to our thought…. At the very least, people would say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally pointing towards them as we sit here….

… The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers….

… In all this there is no self-transcendency in our mental images taken by themselves. They are one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, if you once grant a connecting world to be there.  In short, the ideas and the tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to use Hume’s language, as any two things can be, and pointing means here an operation as external and adventitious as any that nature yields.

I hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge there is no special inner mystery, but only an outer chain of physical or mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing. To know an object is here to lead to it through a context which the world supplies….

Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive acquaintance with an object, and let the object be the white paper before our eyes…. What now do we mean by ‘knowing’ such a sort of object as this?  For this is also the way in which we should know the tiger if our conceptual idea of him were to terminate by having led us to his lair?

… the paper seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is the datum, the phenomenon, or the experience. The paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper, because paper and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience, when, taken in a larger world of which it forms a part, its connections are traced in different directions.¹“