88 SCEPTICISM. 



in judgment we start with an explicit recognition of 

 the essential difference of the ideal content from 

 reality, what enables us to assert their implicit con- 

 nection ? If we start with the assertion that thought 

 and fact are not the same, how do we proceed con- 

 fidently to assert that they are the same, to the 

 extent of substituting the one for the other ? What 

 frenzy gives us the force to leap this gulf, and to 

 pass from avowed difference to unsuggested identity? 

 And this transition is prior, both in idea and in 

 time, to all knowledge ; for it had to be made before 

 knowledge could come into existence : thought and 

 feeling must cohere, must have become commen- 

 surable, before man could become a rational animal. 

 Assuredly the unknown man or monkey who first 

 discovered that his semi-articulate utterances could 

 mea7i something, i.e., could be made to stand for 

 something else than what they were, must be con- 

 sidered to have made the greatest of all discoveries. 

 Only unfortunately this hypothetical origin of know- 

 ledge in an obscure accident will hardly reassure 

 the sceptic as to its validity; he will not readily 

 accept its de facto achievement on the authority of 

 an ancestral ape. 



§ 1 8. And if judgment is thus invalid, what shall 

 be said of the concatenation of judgments in in- 

 ference ? If judgment cannot attain to truth, how 

 far may not our inferences stray from it ? 



And certainly there is this much to be said in 

 their favour, that they hardly pretend to corre- 

 spond with fact. They assert the truth of their 

 conclusions, but not that there is anything in nature 

 to correspond to their methods and processes. And 

 indeed it would be difficult to persuade the most 

 credulous that hypothetical and disjunctive premisses 



