Organic Nature s Riddle 353 



cease to be appreciated because they are never disputed,' 

 so there are many errors which are best exposed by allow- 

 ing them to run to a head. Mr. Butler, who carries this 

 hypothesis of unconscious intelligence to its last con- 

 sequences, asks,^ ' What is to know how to do a thing ? ' 

 His ansAver is, ' Surely, to do it.' And he represents how, 

 when many things have been perfectly learnt, they may 

 be performed unconsciously. In a very amusing chapter 

 on ' Conscious and Unconscious Knowers,' he saj^s, ' When- 

 ever we find people knowing they knoW this or that . . . 

 they do not yet know it perfectly.' In another place he 

 says,2 « ^Yg gr^y ^f \)^q chicken that it knows how to run 

 about as soon as it is hatched . . . but had it no knowledge 

 before it was hatched ? It grew eyes, feathers, and bones ; 

 yet we say it knew nothing about all this. . . . What, then, 

 does it know ? Whatever it knows so weU as to be uncon- 

 scious of knowing it. Knowledge dwells on the confines of 

 uncertainty. When we are very certain we do not know 

 that we know. When we will very strongly, we do not 

 know that we will.' 



Now the fact is that there is great ambiguity in the use 

 of the word know. Just as before with the term memory, 

 so also here, certain distinctions must be drawn if we would 

 think coherently. 



A. To' know,' in the highest sense which we give to the 

 word, is to be aware (by a reflex act) that we really have 

 a certain given perception. It is a voluntary, intelligent, 

 self-conscious act, parallel to that kind of memory which 

 we before distinguished as ' recollection.' 



B. We also say we ' know ' when we do not use a reflex 

 act, but yet have a true perception — a perception accom- 

 panied by consciousness — as when we teach, and in most 

 of our ordinary intellectual acts. 



1^ lAfe and Habit, p. 55. ^ UnconscioiLS Memory, p. 30. 



