liquidation, this everlasting slip, slip, slip, of
direct acquaintance into knowledge-ABOUT, until at last nothing is
left about which the knowledge can be supposed to obtain, does not
all 'significance' depart from the situation? And when our knowledge
about things has reached its never so complicated perfection, must
there not needs abide alongside of it and inextricably mixed in with
it some acquaintance with WHAT things all this knowledge is about?

Now, our supposed little feeling gives a WHAT; and if other feelings
should succeed which remember the first, its WHAT may stand as
subject or predicate of some piece of knowledge-about, of some
judgment, perceiving relations between it and other WHATS which
the other feelings may know. The hitherto dumb Q will then receive a
name and be no longer speechless. But every name, as students
of logic know, has its 'denotation'; and the denotation always means
some reality or content, relationless as extra or with its
internal relations unanalyzed, like the Q which our
primitive sensation is supposed to know. No relation-
expressing proposition is possible except on the basis of a
preliminary acquaintance with such 'facts,' with such contents, as
this. Let the Q be fragrance, let it be toothache, or let it be a
more complex kind of feeling, like that of the full-moon swimming in
her blue abyss, it must first come in that simple shape, and be held
fast in that first intention, before any knowledge ABOUT it can be
attained. The knowledge ABOUT it is IT with a context added. Undo
IT, and what is added cannot be CONtext. [Footnote: If A enters and
B exclaims, 'Didn't you see my brother on the stairs?' we all hold
that A may answer, 'I saw him, but didn't know he was your brother';
ignorance of brotherhood not abolishing power to see. But those who,
on account of the unrelatedness of the first facts with which we