WHAT IS MEANT BY PHILOSOPHY? 



sciousness. As I cannot escape beyond the limits 

 of my consciousness, I can never hope to know 

 more. In order to know the table as it really is, I 

 or my consciousness would have to become iden- 

 tified with it, which can never be. 



Now, though this doctrine is not exactly of 

 universal acceptation, yet we all employ a couple 

 of terms in which it is implicit. The words phe- 

 nomenon and phenomenal are perhaps the most 

 consistently abused in language, as they are cer- 

 tainly among the most valuable and significant 

 when rightly understood. Of course these words 

 no more mean marvel and marvellous than they 

 mean green cheese or hypochondriacal. A phe- 

 nomenon is an appearance, such as this table or 

 the Pleiades; and science deals with phenomena 

 and their relations. When John Locke proved 

 that we have no innate ideas, he proved that our 

 knowledge can only be of phenomena. But we 

 crave to know Reality: phenomenal knowledge 

 does not satisfy us we should be poor creatures 

 if it did. And so we have metaphysics, or, as it is 

 now more properly called, ontology the science 

 of being, the study not of appearances, but of the 

 Reality of which they are the appearances. But 

 this high emprise ordinary folk may leave until 

 such time as, haply, two ontologists understand 

 and agree with each other. 



