CONCEPTION. 471 



contained in tlie words I have italicized, I am unacquainted 

 with it. The Berkeleyan nominalism thus breaks down. 



It is easy to lay bare the false assumption which under- 

 lies the whole discussion of the question as hitherto carried 

 on. That assumption is that ideas, in order to know, must 

 be cast in the exact likeness of whatever things they know, 

 and that the only things that can be known are those which 

 ideas can resemble. The error has not been confined to 

 nominalists. Omnis cognitio Jit per assimilationem cognoscen- 

 tis et cogniti has been the maxim, more or less explicitly 

 assumed, of writers of every school. Practically it amounts 

 to saying that an idea must be a duplicate edition of what 

 it knows* — in other words, that it can only know itself — or, 

 more shortly still, that knoAvledge in any strict sense of the 

 Avord, as a self-transcendent function, is impossible. 



Now our own blunt statements about the ultimateness 

 of the cognitive relation, and the difference between the 

 ' object ' of the thought and its mere ' topic ' or ' subject of 

 discourse ' (cf. pp. 275 ft'.), are all at variance with any such 

 theory ; and we shall find more and more occasion, as we 

 advance in this book, to deny its general truth. All that a 

 state of mind need do, in order to take cognizance of a real- 

 ity, intend it, or be ' about ' it, is to lead to a remoter state 

 of mind which either acts upon the reality or resembles it. 

 The only class of thoughts which can Avitli any show of 

 plausibility be said to resemble their objects are sensations. 

 The stuff of Avhich all our other thoughts are composed is 

 symbolic, and a thought attests its pertinency to a toj^ic by 

 simply terminating, sooner or later, in a sensation which re- 

 sembles the latter. 



But Mill and the rest believe that a thought must he 

 what it means, and meiiu what it is, and that if it be a pic- 

 ture of an entire individual, it cannot mean any part of him 

 to the exclusion of the rest. I say nothing here of the pre- 

 posterously false descriptive psychology involved in the 

 statement that the only things we can mentally picture are 



* E.g. : "The knowledge of thiugs must mean that the mind finds 

 itself in them, or that, in some way, the difference between them and the 

 mind is dissolved." (E. Caird, Philosophy of Kant, first edition, p. 558.) 



