that traverses the pre-possessions not only of common sense
and scholasticism, but also those of nearly all the epistemological
writers whom I have ever read. The answer, made brief, is this:
The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely
as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that
follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed
out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate
presence, of the tigers. It is known as our rejection of a jaguar,
if that beast were shown us as a tiger; as our assent to a genuine
tiger if so shown. It is known as our ability to utter all sorts of
propositions which don't contradict other propositions that are true
of the real tigers. It is even known, if we take the tigers very
seriously, as actions of ours which may terminate in directly
intuited tigers, as they would if we took a voyage to India for the
purpose of tiger-hunting and brought back a lot of skins of the
striped rascals which we had laid low. In all this there is no self-
transcendency in our mental images TAKEN BY THEMSELVES. They are one
phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the
tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, IF
YOU ONCE GRANT A CONNECTING WORLD TO BE THERE. In short, the ideas
and the tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to
use Hume's language, as any two things can be; and pointing means
here an operation as external and adventitious as any that
nature yields.[Footnote: A stone in one field may 'fit,' we say, a
hole in another field. But the relation of 'fitting,' so long as no
one carries the stone to the hole and drops it in, is only one name
for the fact that such an act MAY happen. Similarly with the
knowing of the tigers here and now. It is only an anticipatory
name for a further associative and terminative process that
MAY occur.]