225 
knew the nugget was there” and yet the true thought of it 
was in his mind exactly as if he had seen it with his eyes.* 
We are thus forced away from this notion of knowledge as 
an impression on an intelligence. No mere impression made 
on the intelligence in any way in which such an impression 
ever is made is really knowledge, or the true meaning of 
the verb “ to know ; ” since even true thought directly im- 
pressed on the mind is not knowledge. All these impres- 
sions, outer and inner, are but the raw material , so to speak, 
from which knowledge is manufactured. 
Mr. Stuart Mill himself gives us the key to another idea of 
knowledge when he says that — “ What consciousness directly 
reveals, together with what can be legitimately inferred from 
its revelations, composes, by universal admission, all that we 
know of the mind, or, indeed, of anything else.”*]* Here 
manifestly are two very different classes of ideas — direct reve- 
lations of consciousness, and inferences legitimately derived 
from these revelations. Whatever is to be understood by such 
revelations, it must be distinct from the inferences. The first 
may be impressions made upon the mind ; but the second are 
results produced by the mind’s own working and are not 
mere impressions. There can be no confounding of these two 
classes of the states of every man’s mind, by any one who is 
careful to think clearly on the subject of knowledge. But there 
is more than their differing from each other to be noticed, of 
these classes of mental states. Sensations by themselves, 
coupled with direct ideas that rise in the intelligence, form a 
momentous assemblage of such states ; but neither the one, 
nor the other, nor both, as we have already seen, can reason- 
ably be set down as knowledge. It is only when that has 
taken place which is expressed by the words “ I infer” that 
* We might take such cases as the following to illustrate this point. A 
friend of mine was engaged in a lawsuit which cost him great trouble. About 
a year before it was settled he saw in a dream the postman coming to him 
with a letter telling him of his success, and he imagined that he brought it 
in and read it to his wife. The dream was a perfect representation of what 
took place when his agent wrote to him of the termination of the suit. No 
one would say he knew a year before what would occur, and yet he saiv it all. 
Another friend has handed me a letter in which a husband says, that on 
account of his wife’s extreme weakness her brother’s death had been concealed 
from her, yet, he says, “ she has seen him on his deathbed, and also seen him 
die.” It was all to her as if she had been there, yet they told her it was 
“ only imagination,” and she could not say whether they were telling her 
the truth or concealing it. She could not be said to know he was dead. — J. K. 
t Ex. Sir W. Hamilton's Phil., pp. 107, 108. Edit. 1866. 
