THE DATA OF PHILOSOPHY. 



gold reaches what we regard as the highest certainty we 

 know it to be gold in the fullest sense of knowing. For, 

 as we here see, our whole knowledge of gold consists in 

 nothing more than the consciousness of a definite set of im- 

 pressions, standing in definite relations, disclosed under 

 definite conditions; and if, in a present experience, the 

 impressions, relations, and conditions, perfectly correspond 

 with those in past experiences, the cognition has all the 

 validity of which it is capable. So that, generalizing the 

 statement, hypotheses, down even to those simple ones 

 which we make from moment to moment in our acts of re- 

 cognition, are verified when entire congruity is found to 

 exist between the states of consciousness constituting them, 

 and certain other states of consciousness given in percep- 

 tion, or reflection, or both; and no other knowledge is pos- 

 sible for us than that which consists of the consciousness of 

 such congruities and their correlative incongruities. 



Hence Philosophy, compelled to make those fundamen- 

 tal assumptions without which thought is impossible, has to 

 justify them by showing their congruity with all other dicta 

 of consciousness. Debarred as we are from everything 

 beyond the relative, truth, raised to its highest form, can be 

 for us nothing more than perfect agreement, throughout the 

 whole range of our experience, between those representa- 

 tions of things which we distinguish as ideal and those pre- 

 sentations of things which we distinguish as real. If, by 

 discovering a proposition to be untrue, we mean nothing 

 more than discovering a difference between a thing ex- 

 pected and a thing perceived; then a body of conclusions 

 in which no such difference anywhere occurs, must be what 

 we mean by an entirely true body of conclusions. 



And here, indeed, it becomes also obvious that, setting 

 out with these fundamental intuitions provisionally assumed 

 to be true that is, provisionally assumed to be congruous 

 with all other dicta of consciousness the process of proving 

 or disproving the congruity becomes the business of Philoso- 



