Suppose me to be sitting here in my library at Cambridge, at ten minutes’ walk from ‘Memorial Hall,’ and to be thinking truly of the latter object.  My mind may have before it only the name, or it may have a clear image, or it may have a very dim image of the hall, but such an intrinsic difference in the image makes no difference in its cognitive function.  Certain extrinsic phenomena, special experiences of conjunction, are what impart to the image, be it what it may, its knowing office.

For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean by my image, and I can tell you nothing; or if I fail to point or lead you towards the Harvard Delta; or if, being led by you, I am uncertain whether the Hall I see be what I had in mind or not; you would rightly deny that I had ‘meant’ that particular hall at all, even tho my mental image might to some degree have resembled it.  The resemblance would count in that case as coincidental merely, for all sorts of things of a kind resemble one another in this world without being held for that reason to take cognizance of one another.

On the other hand, if I can lead you to the hall, and tell you of its history and present uses; if in its presence I feel my idea, however imperfect it may have been, to have led hither and to be now terminated; if the associates of the image and of the felt hall run parallel, so that each term of the one context corresponds serially, as I walk, with an answering term of the other; why then my soul was prophetic, and my idea must be, and by common consent would be, called cognizant of reality.  That percept was what I meant, for into it my idea has passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness and fulfilled intention.  Nowhere is there jar, but every later moment continues and corroborates an earlier one.

In this continuing and corroborating, taken in no transcendental sense, but denoting definitely felt transitions, lies all that the knowing of A percept by an idea can possibly contain or signify.  Wherever such transitions are felt, the first experience knows the last one.  Where they do not, or where even as possibles they can not, intervene, there can be no pretence of knowing.  In this latter case the extremes will be connected, if connected at all, by inferior relations—­bare likeness or succession, or by ‘withness’ alone.  Knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience.  It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time.  Whenever certain intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop towards their terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that their starting-point thereby becomes A knower and their terminus an object meant or