BETWEEN SENSE AND INTELLECT.

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But, having thus justified

our rejection of the idealist form of relativism, it will be con

venient here to meet explicitly the question, How is it that

although the modes in which material reality appear to sense

consciousness are partly relative to, and dependent on, subjective

sense factors, the modes which such reality are judged really to

have by intellect, and in general the characters ascribed by intel

lectual knowledge to all reality, whether in contingent judgments

concerning the existence of reality l or in necessary judgments

concerning its nature, appertain to these realities as they are

absolutely, independently of their being known, and do not rather

partly belong to the intellect, thus characterizing not the extra-

mental reality as it really is, but only as it is "transformed" by

intellect, which would be Idealism.

In the first place, then, it must be noted that mere sense

awareness or sense perception is not knowledge; that it only

furnishes the data, the materials of knowledge, the data for

interpretation ; that knowledge begins with judgment or inter

pretation ; that mere sense awareness is not knowledge even of

the bare existence of something ; that knowledge of existence

begins with the predication of existence, and thus supposes the

intellectual concept of existence; and that, a fortiori, knowledge

of the nature or essence of anything also involves intellectual

judgments, predicates, concepts. We have already referred

(77) to the difficulty of separating, even by an effort of ab

straction, the purely sense elements in our complex cognitive

experience, from the intellectual factors ; and we have noted

especially (114) the danger of confounding our concepts of the

sense qualities, particularly of the primary sense qualities, with

our percepts of these qualities, or with these qualities as per

ceived. Yet if we are to analyse our cognitive experience

effectively we must make this effort of abstraction.

Secondly, we must not forget that it is by intellectual intro

spection, and by means of concepts, that we have been investi

gating our sensuous perceptive processes, and envisaging the

inarticulate, uninterpreted stream of conscious data presented

through those processes.

Thirdly, if there be a relativity of those sense data to the

1 I.e. of contingent reality; and in the one necessary existential judgment con

cerning the existence of the Necessary, Self-Existent Being.

RE LA Tl VIST THEORIES OF KNO W LEDGE 2 1 3

self as perceiver, if they depend partially, for the qualities they

reveal to sense consciousness, on the perceiver, this relativity and

dependence are not unconscious ; we are not unaware of it ; we

have discovered it by investigation of our perceptive processes.

Such relativity and dependence, therefore, cannot mislead or de

ceive, cannot vitiate our knowledge of the sense qualities : we are

aware of it and allow for it in our intellectual interpretation of

the real nature of those sense qualities.

Fourthly, looking at this dependence of sense data and their

qualities on the subjective or "self" factor in perception, and

their consequent relativity to the self, we find that it is not a

dependence of those data and their qualities on the self as con

scious, or a relativity of them to the self as subject of awareness,

but that it is a dependence of them on the self as organic, and a

relativity of them to the organic structure and constitution and

conditions of the material or bodily sense organs whereby they are

revealed to consciousness. The relation of dependence is not

between the mental and the extramental, between the subject

and the object of awareness : both terms of the relation are

extramental in the sense of objective to consciousness ; for the

terms of the relation of dependence are respectively the whole

domain of sense data and their qualities, the whole domain of

" material " reality, on the one hand, and the special portion of

this domain which is the perceiver s own body or sense organon

on the other hand. The " subjective " or " self" factor, therefore

to which perceived sense data and their qualities are " relative,"

and on which they are partially dependent for their perceived

characters, is not a mental factor at all, not a factor of the self or

subject as cognitive, but is a factor of that portion of material

reality which is interpreted by intellect to be united, in the in

dividuality of the human person, with the conscious, cognitive

principle or " mind " of the knowing subject, and to be the extra-

mental, material organon which directly subserves the process of

sense perception, and the channel through which sense con

sciousness has immediately presented to it all sense data and

qualities, both organic or " internal " and extra-organic or "ex

ternal ". Thus we see that the partial "subjectivity" of sense

data and their qualities is not at all a " mental " subjectivity

arising from any mental but sub-conscious (or a priori, trans

cendental} factors of the constitution of the self as cognitive,

but that it is an " extramental " subjectivity arising from the

2 1 4 THEOR Y OF KNO WLEDGE

known and experienced constitution of the self or subject as

organic.

Idealists, of course, assuming both the organic and the extra-organic sense

data to be psychic or mental states, must necessarily hold that the relativity

and dependence in question have reference to mental factors of the conscious

subject : and whether their intellectual interpretation of the whole matter is

right, or the realist s intellectual interpretation, will depend on the verdict

pronounced by introspective analysis of our concepts, regarding the -validity

(and the origin and nature, as throwing light on the validity) of these latter.

But even some of the realist supporters of the theory of mediate sense per

ception appear to regard the relativity of perceived sense data and qualities

as a relativity to mental factors of the perceiver (125, 127) ; or at least to

miss the significance of the fact that the relativity is to subjective organic

factors, and not to subjective mental factors, of the perceiver.

Fifthly, if sense data and their qualities as perceived by sense

are relative to and dependent on merely the organic factors, but

are not relative to or dependent on any mental factors of the

conscious subject, neither are those sense data or qualities as

conceived by intellect relative to any mental factors of the con

scious subject. While sense becomes aware of objects only

through the functioning of bodily sense organs, the sense

faculties being organic faculties, so that perceptive acts are at

once conscious (or mental) and organic (or bodily), intellect

apprehends objects by a cognitive process which is not organic,

which is not the act of a bodily or material organ at all, which

is "spiritual," i.e. subjectively independent of the organic con

stitution of the thinking and judging human subject. But

intellect is a faculty of the same individual mind or soul which

animates the body, and which, as animating the body, is also

endowed with organic sense faculties. The objects, therefore,

which intellect first apprehends, and which first stimulate thought,

i.e. conception, reflection, comparison, interpretation, inference,

are furnished to it by sense, are already data of our direct

sense awareness. These it apprehends in a manner altogether

foreign to sense : it can apprehend in them what sense cannot :

for sense they are mere objects of awareness ; intellect can

apprehend what they are : it can reflect on them, on how they

came into consciousness, on the nature and conditions of the

perception process ; and in judging wJiat they arc it can and

does take cognizance of their partial dependence on the organism

for what they appear to sense consciousness. It can thus judge

RELATIVIST THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 215

what they are really because it can apprehend them apart from

all the "material" qualities which characterize them as concrete,

individual, felt data of sense consciousness ; nay, every one of

these felt characteristics themselves it can envisage in the abstract

and thus apprehend what each is, naming them as "taste," "red

ness," "sound," "heat," "motion," "extensity," "plurality," " in-

ternality" or " selfness," "externality" or "otherness," etc., etc. 1

Furthermore, it can reflect on the concrete sense data, on the

way they appear to sense-consciousness, on its own mode of

apprehending them in the abstract, on the concrete data of direct

intellectual consciousness (100), on the objects which by its

own activity it discovers in and through those immediate data of

consciousness, thought-objects or objective concepts such as

"being," "existence," "substance," "cause," "action," "re

lation," "matter," "spirit," "time," "space," etc., etc.; and it

can see that while sense, in so far as it apprehends these objects,

cannot interpret them, or apprehend them as such, but is merely

aware of a chaotic, ever-changing domain of being, in which these

realities are, but are for sense unmeaning and uninterpreted,

intellect alone can apprehend what these objects really are, can

give them a meaning, and can thereby attain to a knowledge, an

1 And why ? Because intellect is itself not a mere organic faculty of awareness

(awareness of a something which no mere sense faculty can even know to be

" material," but which is really material because intellect apprehends and interprets

it to be really all that we understand by the " material " mode of being), but a

faculty cognitive of reality, a faculty which apprehends real being as such, a

" spiritual " faculty, therefore, which in its mode of apprehension transcends the

mere inarticulate, brute mode of sense awareness, and " cognitively " possesses or

apprehends its objects untrammelled by the organic factor of sense, so that it knou s

by reflection that they appear to it as they really are. All cognition, all awareness, is

a reception of an object in a subject, an " apprehension " or " cognitive possession "

of an object by a subject. The mode of apprehension, therefore, is determined by

the nature, the mode of being, of the subject : Qnidquid recipitur, sccundum moduni

rccipicntis recipitiir. Reflecting on sense perception and on intellectual conception

and interpretation, we see that sense, being a conscious faculty of an organic,

corporeal, material subject, can cognitively appropriate or apprehend reality only

in so far as this is material, or characterized by the modes which characterize the

perceiving subject as organic, that on the part of the sentient subject it is a mere

direct awareness of sense data (some of which are subjective or organic and others

extra-subjective or extra-organic) but is devoid of reflection or conscious discrimination

or recognition or interpretation of them as subjective or objective ; while intellect,

being immaterial or spiritual, transcends the material mode of mere sense awareness,

is not subjectively limited by organic factors, and therefore apprehends immaterially

and apart from their material, concrete, sense qualities, the real being of material

data, and apprehends also, in and through these, both the reality of these material

modes of being themselves, and other really immaterial modes of being which lie

entirely beyond the range of sense.

2 1 6 THE OR Y OF KNO WLED GE

interpretation of the reality of this sense domain, the reality of

the self as sentient and rational, and the reality of a domain of

being which, though not accessible to sense, can be rationally

inferred from the domain of sense as interpreted by intellect.