jection which has been urged by Mr. Prichard against the whole Idealist position. He insists that, even if it be admitted that things are created by God, and that nothing is created which is not also known, still the idea of creation is different from that of being known, and we should still have to think of the things as having an existence apart from their being known. "Knowledge," he tells us, "is essentially discovery, or the finding of what already is. If a reality could be or come to be in virtue of some activity or process on the part of the mind, that activity or process would not be 'knowing' but 'making' or 'creating,' and to make and to know must in the end be admitted to be mutually exclusive."11 Of course to know is not the same thing as to create. But it does not follow that, because an object of thought is conceived as being caused by the knower, therefore it must be supposed to be capable of existing apart from the knowledge. Things which are distinguishable are not always separable. We have no experience of creating material things: such things are certainly not created by our individual thought. But we do know some objects of knowledge which unquestionably cannot be supposed to exist apart from knowledge. In this sweeping assertion about the relation between the knower and the known, Mr. Prichard (as is so often the case with philosophers) seems momentarily to have forgotten that we do know some objects of knowledge which are not material things, and which cannot on any view be supposed to exist apart from knowledge, and some of these we do also make or cause to exist. My toothache is no doubt not the same as my knowing that I have a toothache; but the experience of toothache cannot be conceived of as existing apart from consciousness, or even apart from that particular kind of consciousness which we call knowledge. Even if we suppose that there are sensations which we do not reflect on sufficiently to make our consciousness of them what we generally mean by knowledge, such an experience is not the same thing

11 Prichard, Kant's Theory of Knowledge, p. 118, cf. p. 235 sq.

13

as the experience becomes when it is reflected on and known. And this possibility wholly disappears with acute sensations. An unknown toothache would be the kind of toothache we pray for when we are suffering from a known toothache. The experience of acute toothache fully reflected on is certainly something which cannot be supposed to exist apart from our knowledge of it. And therefore it seems to me extravagant to say with Mr. Prichard, "It must in the end be conceded of a toothache as much as of a stone that it exists independently of the knowledge of it.''12 In this case the thing does, indeed, exist apart from and in opposition to our volition; but it does not and cannot exist apart from being known. This itself would be enough to refute the astonishing assertion that knowledge is in all cases the discovery of what existed before the knowledge.' But there are other experiences which are voluntarily caused and yet cannot exist apart from being known. When I deliberately attend to a picture, the resulting esthetic experience is in part dependent upon my voluntary activity, and did not exist before that voluntary attention began. "Even if the reality known, says Mr. Prichard (pp. 235-6) "happens to be something which we make, e.g., a house, the knowing of it is distinct from the making of it, and, so far from being identical with the making, presupposes that the reality in question is already made. Music and poetry are, no doubt, realities which in some sense are made or composed, but the apprehension of them is distinct from and presupposes the process by which they are composed. In the case of the house the distinction between knowing and making is, of course, from the point of view of common sense, clear enough, since another can know without having made. If we suppose, however, a tune composed but not performed or written down, can

12 Ibid., p. 118.

13 Mr. Bertrand Russell more cautiously says "What makes a belief true is a fact, and this fact does not (except in exceptional cases) in any way involve the mind of the person who has the belief." (The Problems of Philosophy, p. 203).

we say that the thing is made before it is known, or could exist without being known? I can distinguish between the esthetic experience and my knowledge of it, or again between my act of attention and my knowledge; but neither of them could exist unaltered without the other. They are aspects of an indivisible experience. Here then clearly "to make" and "to know" are not mutually exclusive, unless "to make" be arbitrarily defined as meaning "to create a material object in the sense in which the Realist understands material object," which would be a mere petitio principii.

We certainly have no experience of creating the particular kind of reality which is called matter. But the illustration shows that there is no a priori inconceivability in the idea of a Mind which does make the very objects which it also knows, and whose existence is inseparable from its knowing them. We can even, by way of analogy, imagine in some inadequate way what such an experience must be like. Given a previous experience of what we call actual things—an experience of which we are not the cause—we can to some limited extent call up a picture of the things so vivid as to reproduce many of the characteristics of the experience caused by the actually present object; and the things so called up are in space and in that sense objective. We do not create things but we do create pictures of things. That analogy is quite sufficient to give some meaning to the conception of a Consciousness which requires no such previous experience of things created by another in order to present to itself a world of which it is the cause. But once again, I do not profess to be able to understand fully what things are like to a consciousness which has the experience of actually creating them. To know exactly what things are like to God, one would have to be God, more completely God, I may say, than even a Hegelian philosopher pretends to be. The relation of the things to God's consciousness is doubtless not the same as it is to our own. If that is all that is meant by the assertion that things have an existence of their own apart from our knowledge of

them, I should have no objection to making the admission. But no admission as to the limitations which hedge about our knowledge, as to the kind of existence which things have when viewed from the point of view of a creative Consciousness, will do anything at all to give meaning or credibility to the assertion that things exist apart from consciousness altogether. The being of things may beno doubt must be in a sense different from the knowledge of them, even for a Consciousness which causes all the things which it thinks, just as our voluntarily caused experiences are distinguishable from our knowledge of them. What the Idealist must deny is the possibility of the existence of the thing-in-itself apart from some consciousness which knows it. He must maintain that the things do not and cannot exist apart from their presence to a Consciousness in whose experiences the aspects which we distinguish as knowing, perceiving, willing, are combined and doubtless transcended. The being of material things and the consciousness of them are two inseparable sides or aspects of one and the same reality. What Idealism denies is not the existence of matter but the independent existence of matter.11

14 Mr. Prichard admits (though it is not clear on what grounds his dogmatic assertion is based) that "it would be impossible for a universe consisting solely of the physical world to originate thought or beings capable of thinking. "But" (he continues) "the real presupposition of the coming into existence of human knowledge at a certain stage in the process of the universe is to be found in the pre-existence not of a mind or minds which always actually knew, but simply of a mind or minds in which, under certain conditions, knowledge is necessarily actualized. (Ibid., p. 127). If I could believe in a Universe in which from all eternity minds had slept unconsciously till they were awakened (presumably by some material process), it would not add much to the marvel that the mind itself should have been so originated.

THE BACKGROUND OF GREEK SCIENCE

JOHN LINTON MYRES

The object of this essay is to link together some of the fragmentary statements which have come down to us about the first Greek attempts to describe and interpret Nature and Man. We are familiar with the notion that it is to the Greeks that we owe the belief that it is possible so to describe and interpret; the belief that nature is intelligible to man, and that to understand nature is one of the first and most necessary steps towards a life that shall be not merely comfortable and efficient but good and worthy of

We are familiar, too, with the belief of the Greeks themselves that their principal achievements in this enquiry belonged to an early phase of thought, the "physical school" of philosophy, which had its headquarters in Ionia; and with the fact that the activities of this "physical school" were for the most part over, when Socrates at the end of the fifth century B.C. brought philosophy (as they said) "from the skies to earth," and founded a "moral school," a philosophy of conduct, with its headquarters at Athens. Many of us are probably familiar also with the extant fragments of these "physical" philosophers, and with later Greek opinions about them; and some of us have been brought up to regard the pre-Socratics in general as a set of very childish, rather fantastic dreamers, and to congratulate ourselves that their works-and those of Her