THERE are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or
intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or
representatively. Altho such things as the white paper before our
eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the
tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of
philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically.

Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual
knowledge; and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we
sit here. Exactly what do we MEAN by saying that we here know the
tigers? What is the precise fact that the cognition so
confidently claimed is KNOWN-AS, to use Shadworth
Hodgson's inelegant but valuable form of words?

Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is
having them, however absent in body, become in some way present to
our thought; or that our knowledge of them is known as presence of
our thought to them. A great mystery is usually made of
this peculiar presence in absence; and the scholastic philosophy,
which is only common sense grown pedantic, would explain it as a
peculiar kind of existence, called INTENTIONAL EXISTENCE of the
tigers in our mind. At the very least, people would say that what we
mean by knowing the tigers is mentally POINTING towards them as we
sit here.

But now what do we mean by POINTING, in such a case as this? What is
the pointing known-as, here?

To this question I shall have to give a very prosaic answer--one