appearance of intuitive truths, owing their cogency to nothing beyond
themselves. A man's belief in his own merits, however it may have been
first obtained, is as immediately assured to him as his recognition of a
real object in the act of sense-perception. It may be added that many of
our every-day working beliefs about the world in which we live, though
presumably derived from memory and perception, tend to lose all traces
of their origin, and to simulate the aspect of intuitions. Thus the
proposition that logicians are in the habit of pressing on our
attention, that "Men are mortal," seems, on the face of it, to common
sense to be something very like a self-evident truth, not depending on
any particular facts of experience.

In calling these four forms of cognition immediate, I must not, however,
be supposed to be placing them on the same logical level. It is plain,
indeed, to a reflective mind that, though each may be called immediate
in this superficial sense, there are perceptible differences in the
degree of their immediacy. Thus it is manifest, after a moment's
reflection, that expectation, so far as it is just, is not primarily
immediate in the sense in which purely presentative knowledge is so,
since it can be shown to follow from something else. So a general
proposition, though through familiarity and innumerable illustrations it
has acquired a self-evident character, is seen with a very little
inspection to be less fundamentally and essentially so than the
proposition, "I am now feeling pain;" and it will be found that even
with respect to memory, when the remembered event is at all remote, the
process of cognition approximates to a mediate operation, namely, one of
inference. What the relative values of these different kinds of
immediate knowledge are is a point which will have to be touched on at
the end of our study. Here it must suffice to warn the reader against
the supposition that this value is assumed to be identical.