with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge of truths. Thus in the presence of my table I am acquainted with the sense-data that makes up the appearance of my table-its colour, shape, hardness, smoothness, etc.; all these are things of which I am immediately conscious when I am seeing and touching my table. The particular shade of colour that I am seeing may have many things said about it-I may say that it is brown, that it is rather dark, and so on. But such statements, though they make me know truths

about

the colour, do not make me know the colour itself any better than I did before: so far as concerns knowledge of the colour itself, as opposed to knowledge of truths about it I know the colour perfectly and completely when I see it, and no farther knowledge of it itself is even theoretically possible. Thus the sense- data which make up the appearance of my table are things with which I have acquaintance, things immediately known to me just as they are.

My knowledge of the table as a physical object, on the contrary, is not direct knowledge. Such as it is, it is obtained through acquaintance with the sense-data that make up the appearance of the table. We have seen that it is possible, without absurdity, to doubt whether there is a table at all, whereas it is not possible to doubt the sense-data. My knowledge of the table is of the kind which we shall call “knowledge by description”. The table is “the physical object which causes such-and- such sense-data.” This

describes

the table by means of the sense-data. In order to know anything at all about the table, we must know truths connecting it with things with which we have acquaintance: we must know that “such-and-such sense-data are caused by a physical object”. There is no state of mind in which we are directly aware of the table; all our knowledge of the table is really knowledge of

truths , and the actual thing which is the table is not, strictly speaking, known to us at all. We know a description, and we know that there is just one object to which this description applies, though the object itself is not directly known to us. In such a case, we say that our knowledge of the object is knowledge by description.

The Problems of Philosophy, pp. 73-75

النص الخامس: الكون وأجزاؤه

تميل النظرة التقليدية إلى أن تتخذ من الكون نفسه موضوعا لمحمولات متعددة لا يمكن حملها على أي شيء جزئي مما يحتويه الكون، وأن تجعل من وصف الكون بمثل هذه المحمولات المميزة له موضوع اختصاص للفلسفة، أما أنا - فعلى عكس ذلك - أذهب إلى أنه ليس هنالك قضايا مما يكون «الكون» فيها موضوعا، وبعبارة أخرى، ليس هنالك شيء اسمه «الكون»، مذهبي هو أن ثمة قضايا عامة قد تقال عن كل شيء جزئي على حدة، مثل قضايا المنطق، لكن ذلك لا يقتضي أن تكون مجموعة الأشياء الموجودة مكونة لكل يمكن اعتباره شيئا آخر يضاف إلى سائر الأشياء، وبذلك يمكن جعله موضوعا لمحمولات، وكل ما يقتضيه كلامي هو القول بأن هنالك خصائص توصف بها الأشياء جميعا شيئا شيئا، فالفلسفة التي أود أن أناصرها يمكن أن نطلق عليها اسم الذرية المنطقية، أو التعددية المطلقة؛ لأنني في الوقت الذي آخذ فيه بوجود أشياء كثيرة، أنكر أن يكون هنالك كل واحد مكون من هذه الأشياء.

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