All knowledge which has any appearance of being directly reached, immediate, or self-evident, that is to say, of not being inferred from other knowledge, may be divided into four principal varieties:  Internal Perception or Introspection of the mind’s own feelings; External Perception; Memory; and Belief, in so far as it simulates the form of direct knowledge.  The first is illustrated in a man’s consciousness of a present feeling of pain or pleasure.  The second and the third kinds have already been spoken of, and are too familiar to require illustration.  It is only needful to remark here that, under perception, or rather in close conjunction with it, I purpose dealing with the knowledge of other’s feelings, in so far as this assumes the aspect of immediate knowledge.  The term belief is here used to include expectations and any other kinds of conviction that do not fall under one of the other heads.  An instance of a seemingly immediate belief would be a prophetic prevision of a coming disaster, or a man’s unreasoned persuasion as to his own powers of performing a difficult task.

It is, indeed, said by many thinkers that there are no legitimate immediate beliefs; that all our expectations and other convictions about things, in so far as they are sound, must repose on other genuinely immediate knowledge, more particularly sense-perception and memory.  This difficult question need not be discussed here.  It is allowed by all that there is a multitude of beliefs which we hold tenaciously and on which we are ready to act, which, to the mature mind, wear the appearance of intuitive truths, owing their cogency to nothing beyond themselves.  A man’s belief in his own merits, however it may have been first obtained, is as immediately assured to him as his recognition of a real object in the act of sense-perception.  It may be added that many of our every-day working beliefs about the world in which we live, though presumably derived from memory and perception, tend to lose all traces of their origin, and to simulate the aspect of intuitions.  Thus the proposition that logicians are in the habit of pressing on our attention, that “Men are mortal,” seems, on the face of it, to common sense to be something very like a self-evident truth, not depending on any particular facts of experience.

In calling these four forms of cognition immediate, I must not, however, be supposed to be placing them on the same logical level.  It is plain, indeed, to a reflective mind that, though each may be called immediate in this superficial sense, there are perceptible differences in the degree of their immediacy.  Thus it is manifest, after a moment’s reflection, that expectation, so far as it is just, is not primarily immediate in the sense in which purely presentative knowledge is so, since it can be shown to follow from something else.  So a general proposition, though through familiarity and innumerable illustrations it has acquired a self-evident character, is seen with