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 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.]