THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF 

 KNOWLEDGE * 



IT should be possible to discern and describe a 

 knowing as one identifies any object, concern, 

 or event. It must have its own marks; it must 

 offer characteristic features as much so as a 

 thunder-storm, the constitution of a State, or a 

 leopard. In the search for this affair, we are first 

 of all desirous for something which is for itself, 

 contemporaneously with its occurrence, a cognition, 

 not something called knowledge by another and 

 from without whether this other be logician, 

 psychologist, or epistemologist. The &quot; knowl 

 edge &quot; may turn out false, and hence no knowl 

 edge; but this is an after-affair; it may prove 

 to be rich in fruitage of wisdom, but if this 

 outcome be only wisdom after the event, it 

 does not concern us. What we want is just some 

 thing which takes itself as knowledge, rightly or 

 wrongly. 



1 Reprinted, with considerable change in the arrange 

 ment and in the matter of the latter portion, from Mind, 

 Vol. XV., N.S., July, 1906. 



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