ESSAYS 301 



stirred in the knower, these discriminating processes guided by the constitu- 

 tion of the reahty discriminated, truth acquired by the moulding of differ- 

 entiating discrimination on the object : there seems to be causal interaction, 

 and there seems to be something very like a " copy " of reality made at close 

 quarters instead of at a distance. If a draughtsman drawing a distant 

 house on his paper represent " copying " through causal action by a " tran- 

 scendent " not-self upon a self, an engraving stamped from a plate by close 

 contact would seem to represent " copying " in the theory of intuitive 

 knowledge through the immanence of the object in knowing. 



Copies are surely causally affected by the copied. False copying indi- 

 cates a co-operation between copied and copier which is surely causal in 

 character. If the copier introduces error at the instance of the copied, if 

 he is stirred, as his false copy seems to show he is stirred, by the presence 

 of his object, there is causal action. " But since, in the process of knowing 

 the only agent is the knowing subject who makes the comparison, it is only 

 he who can introduce into the object elements foreign to it. In this sense 

 it may be said that truth is the objective and falsity the subjective appear- 

 ance of the object." ^ Lossky is compelled to admit the efi&ciency of the 

 knower when he makes mistakes ; since his mistaken versions are responses 

 to the reality he falsifies, for it would be irrational to suppose in him a pure 

 spontaneity which is regardless of it, does he not also implicitly admit causal 

 influence of known upon knower ? If it is perplexing to deprive the reality 

 immanent in knowledge of its causal bond with the discriminating process 

 which differentiates it, it is still more perplexing to discover that there may 

 be lapses into such causality which provoke error in knowing. It would be 

 hypercritical to pick out the causal terms which constantly appear in 

 Lossky's description of the knowing process, for language is saturated with 

 such causal terms, and he is compelled to use this common instrument of 

 expression ; but that description, taken as a whole, seems to require an 

 essential causal action between immanent object and differentiating knower 

 which in no way annuls the causal bond between self and not-self. 



The causal relation between known and knower involved in misrepre- 

 sentative knowing seems to carry the a fortiori implication of a similar 

 causal relation when the knower truly knows his object. Theories of knov/- 

 ledge often disclose their weaknesses in their estimates of error, and Lossky 

 seems, in his explanation of falsity, to confess the causal link which he sys- 

 tematically denies in his exposition. This causal link seems to be as im- 

 manent in his version of knowledge as he supposes the object to be in the 

 process of knowing, and, imperfectly concealed in his estimate of truth, to 

 be laid bare in his estimate of error. If its estimation of error probes a 

 theory of knowledge, its relations to memory probe it even deeper still. 

 The cumulative effect of experience upon percipiency, the undoubted fact 

 that " experiences differentiated in the past do facilitate the differentiation 

 of present experiences, and also that the process of indirect perception is 

 accompanied by memories ' ' 2 with all the familiar detail of memory, seem 

 to scatter doubts on Lossky's epistemological path. Comparison with 

 memory images suggests, for perceived objects, a looseness of attachment 

 to the knowing process which appears to be curiously incompatible with 

 their immanency in it. With a turn of the heel the eye exchanges a per- 

 ception of a tree for a perception of a pig ; objects pop in and out of per- 

 ception in agreement with our movements ; darkness deprives vision of 

 its objects, and light admits them to it. Memory images, allowing for 

 obliviscence, neither disappear in darkness nor depend in an essential way 

 upon time and place. It may be true that " crude arguments," like the 



1 The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge (Duddington's trans.), p. 227. 



2 Ibid., p. 338. 



20 



