A Thing is Behaviour ; ' What ' and 'How ' 271 



taught by the physicists — there are no lumps. To make 

 a thing a lump — not to cite other objections to it — 

 would be to make it impossible that we should know it as 

 a thing. So all those doctrines which I have classed as 

 other than idealistic accept, and have an interest in de- 

 fending, the view that the reality of a thing is presented 

 in its behaviour. 



§2. A Thing is Behaviour ; the 'What' and the 'How' 



So setting that down as the first answer to the * what ' 

 question, we may profitably expand it a little. The more 

 we know of behaviour of a certain kind, then the more we 

 know of reality, or of the reality, at least, which that kind 

 of behaviour is. And it is evident that we may know 

 more of behaviour in two ways. We may know more of 

 behaviour because we take in more of it at once ; this 

 depends on the basis of knowledge we already have — the 

 relative advance of science in description, explanation, etc., 

 upon which our interpretation of the behaviour before us 

 rests. In the behaviour of a bird which flits before him, a 

 child sees only a bright object in motion; that is the 

 ' thing ' to him. But when the bird flits before a natural- 

 ist, he sees a thing whose behaviour exhausts about all 

 that is known of the natural sciences. Yet in the two cases 

 there is the * thing,' in just about the same sense. 



When we come, moreover, to approach a new thing, we 

 endeavour, in order to know what it is, to find out what it 

 is doing, or what it can do in any artificial circumstances 

 which we may devise. In as far as it does nothing, or 

 as far as we are unable to get it to do anything, just so far 

 we confess ignorance of what it is. We can neither sum- 

 mon to the understanding of it what we have found out 



