Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Theories of Knowledge: Historically Considered; With Special Reference to Scepticism and Belief
When Agassiz came to this country and began to teach Natural History at Harvard, he is said to have made the remark that when the students of Nature go out from their books and their libraries to study nature itself, they never find it. His complaint was, that the students had been studying books, and could repeat all that had been said about things, and discuss very learnedly all the different views of the various authors that had written on the subjects, but when they came face to face with the facts and objects themselves, they knew but very little about them, and in many cases they could not even recog nize them when they had found them. His view commends itself to all men in our day.
These men had studied books and words, rather than things. And it has often appeared to me that many of our students, and teachers, too, of meta physics have made the same mistake.
Words are but arbitrary signs of the things which we propose to signify by them. And it is quite true that in metaphysics we cannot turn from the words of the author to any external facts, objects or processes, which they may be supposed to represent or describe. But if they are true at all they must rep resent and describe some facts or processes of an in ternal character that occur in the minds of men.
And if they have occurred in the mind of any one man and are of a general character, so as to consti tute the proper basis or material for a philosophy, they must have occurred in the minds of most men, and presumably, therefore, in the mind of any stu dent or reader of metaphysics. Hence, he has but to look within himself to the facts of his own consciousness and experience for his illustrations.
But in all cases words must be interpreted by facts, if we are to have any scientific knowledge of anything.
The difference I have in mind admits of an easy and familiar illustration. Suppose we ask the same question to a class of students. Let it be, how is the State of Tennessee bounded P One student will recall and repeat the words which he has learned from some text book the answer, we will suppose, is perfectly correct. The other student immediately recalls in imagination a map and sees the States that are around Tennessee, and gives their names. And he, too, is perfectly correct. But he describes the thing and uses his own words for that purpose, while the former student repeats the words he has learned, and this, as we often see, may be done with out the slightest idea of their meaning.
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