2. Therefore we say, coming closer to our subject, that “Knowledge is the medium in which our world, as an interrelated whole, [1] exists for us.” This is more than saying that it exists in mind or presentation, because the mere course of consciousness need not amount to Knowledge. A world, that is, a system of things acting on one another, could not exist merely in the course of our ideas. But Knowledge, we said, is the mental construction of reality. It consists of what we are obliged to assert in thought, and because we are all obliged to think assertorily according to the same methods, the results of our thinking form corresponding systems—systems that correspond alike to each other and to reality. (I may be asked, does not this agreement of {23} our knowledge depend on the agreement of the physical stimuli supplied to us by nature, as well as on the homogeneousness of our intelligences? The answer is, that these stimuli, or nature, have no priority in Knowledge. Their identity is merely a case or consequence of the identity of our experience as a whole. We are regarding nature as a system developed in experience, not as an unknown somewhat behind it. To suppose that solid or extended existence somehow comes before and accounts for everything else, is a form of the common-sense theory we have dismissed. Knowledge and Truth have their limitations as forms of Reality, but an appeal to solidity or extension will not furnish the required supplementation.)
[1] The words italicised make a reservation in favour of feeling, which has its own form of reality, but is not relational.
Knowledge is in the form of Judgement
3. All that we have been saying about Knowledge is summed up in the sentence, “Knowledge is a judgment, an affirmation.” We need not trouble ourselves yet about negation. We all know what affirmative assertion is, and it is near enough for the present to say that all knowledge is judgment in the sense of affirmative assertion.
I will explain how we sum up all we have said of knowledge by calling it a judgment.
Judgment or affirmation always implies three properties, though they are not always recognised.
It is (a) necessary, (b) universal, and (c) constructive.
Judgment necessary
(a) Judgment is necessary. In saying this, we express all that we said about the objectivity of the world in knowledge. “Objective” meant, we concluded, what we are obliged to think. And judgment is necessary, because it expresses what we are obliged to think; obliged, that is, not as we are obliged to feel pain, as an unexplained and {24} isolated fact, but obliged by a necessity operative within the movement of our consciousness, though not, of course, theoretically recognised as necessity in common thinking. Thus, in the simplest phases of Judgment, necessity does begin to approach the kind of necessity by which we feel pain or are visited by persistent irrational associations.
We can trace an explicit sense of necessity in any scientific matter, or in any doubtful and complex matters in which we are aware of our own reflections. We constantly hear and read such phrases as, “I am unable to resist the conclusion”; “I am forced to believe”; “I am driven to think”; “I have no alternative but to suppose.” These are every-day phrases in controversy and in theoretical discussion. And what they all mean is just what was insisted on in the last lecture; the objective or real for us is what we are obliged to think. Given our perceptive state and our mental equipment, the judgment follows.