Book IV - Of knowledge

Summary

Chapter i

‘Of knowledge in general.’

philalethes. So far, we have spoken about ideas and about the words which represent them. §1. Let us now turn to the knowledge which is provided by our ideas, for it ‘is only conversant about them.’ §2. Knowledge is ‘nothing but the perception of the connection and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any [two] of our ideas.’ Whether we ‘fancy, guess, or believe,’ that is always what it is. This is how we are aware, for instance, ‘that white is not black’, and that there is a necessary connection between the angles of a triangle and their equality with two right angles.

theophilus. Knowledge can be taken even more generally, so that it is involved in ideas and terms before we come to propositions and truths. If someone looks attentively at more pictures of plants and animals than another person, and at more diagrams of machines and descriptions and depictions of houses and fortresses, and if he reads more imaginative novels and listens to more strange stories, then he can be said to have more knowledge than the other, even if there is not a word of truth in all that he has seen and heard. That is because the practice he has had in portraying in his mind a great many actual, explicit conceptions and ideas makes him better able to conceive what is put to him.