itself as a feeling, nor contrasts itself with other feelings, nor
estimates its own duration or intensity. It is, in short, if there
is no more of it than this, a most dumb and helpless and useless
kind of thing.

But if we must describe it by so many negations, and if it can say
nothing ABOUT itself or ABOUT anything else, by what right do we
deny that it is a psychical zero? And may not the 'relationists' be
right after all?

In the innocent looking word 'about' lies the solution of this
riddle; and a simple enough solution it is when frankly looked at. A
quotation from a too seldom quoted book, the Exploratio Philosophica
of John Grote (London, 1865), p. 60, will form the best
introduction to it.

'Our knowledge,' writes Grote, 'may be contemplated in either of two
ways, or, to use other words, we may speak in a double manner of
the "object" of knowledge. That is, we may either use language thus:
we KNOW a thing, a man, etc.; or we may use it thus: we know such
and such things ABOUT the thing, the man, etc. Language in general,
following its true logical instinct, distinguishes between these two
applications of the notion of knowledge, the one being yvwvai,
noscere, kennen, connaitre, the other being eidevai, scire, wissen,
savoir. In the origin, the former may be considered more what I have
called phenomenal--it is the notion of knowledge as ACQUAINTANCE or
familiarity with what is known; which notion is perhaps more akin to
the phenomenal bodily communication, and is less purely
intellectual than the other; it is the kind of knowledge which we
have of a thing by the presentation to the senses or the