Fundamental Problems Author:Paul Carus Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: COGNITION, KNOWLEDGE, AND TRUTH. Cognition in its simplest form is the act of feeling a percept to be the same as another percept perceived before. Cognition ... more »thus is founded in the relations of our percepts among each other. A single impression cannot as yet constitute cognition; two or several percepts of the same kind are needed in order to feel their identity. Cognition consists of two elements; it has a subjective and an objective phase. The objective phase is that the object, now perceived is the same (or at least in some respect the same) as the object perceived before; and the subjective phase is that it is also felt to be the same. The new percept fitting itself into the form produced in the brain by the former percept, is, in the literal sense of the word, re-cognized: it is cognized again. The condition of knowledge accordingly, in its simplest form, is ' the sameness of two or more percepts.' Cognition of the higher and more complicated kind remains at bottom the same. It is always the act of recognizing a unity or a sameness in two or several phenomena. Cognition always presupposes a certain stock of experience, and to understand a phenomenon or to explain it means to recognize its identity with other phenomena with which we are familiar. The falling of stones to the ground is a familiar occurrence withus, and to show in how far the motion of the moon about the earth is the same kind of motion as that of the falling stone, only under other conditions, is an explanation of this phenomenon. Knowledge is the formulated stock of experiences in which we have discovered common features, so that their identity even under different conditions has been and will always again be recognized. Knowledge in animals is simple in comparison with knowledge in man. Anim...« less