f perception, and the chaos of popular
opinion, can lay hold on the universal truth.

A very interesting tendency to clothe the articulations of thought with
the immediacy of perception is exhibited in _mysticism_, which
attributes the highest cognitive power to an experience that transcends
thought, an ineffable insight that is the occasional reward of thought
and virtuous living. This theory would seem to owe its great vigor to
the fact that it promises to unite the universality of the rational
object with the vivid presence of the empirical object, though it
sacrifices the definite content of both. The mystic, empiricist, and
rationalist are in these several ways led to revise their metaphysics
upon the basis of their epistemology, or to define reality in terms
dictated by the means of knowing it.

[Sidenote: The Relation of Knowledge to its Object According to Realism,
and the Representative Theory.]

Sect. 69. But within the general field of epistemology there has arisen
another issue of even greater significance in its bearing upon
metaphysics. The first issue, as we have seen, has reference to the
criterion of knowledge, to the possibility of arriving at certainty
about reality, and the choice of means to that end. A second question
arises, concerning _the relation between the knowledge and its object or
that which is known_. This problem does not at first appear as an
epistemological difficulty, but is due to the emphasis which the moral
and religious interests of men give to the conception of the self. My
knowing is a part of me, a function of that soul whose welfare and
eternal happiness I am seeking to secure. Indeed, my knowing is, so the
wise men have always taught, the greatest of my prerogatives. Wisdom
appertains to the philosopher, as folly to the fool. But though my
knowledge be a part of me, and in me, the same cannot, lightly at any
rate, be said of what I know. It would seem that I must distinguish
between the knowledge, which is my act or state, an event in my life,
and the known, which is object, and belongs to the context of the outer
world. _The object of knowledge_ would then be quite _independent of the
circumstance that I know it_. This theory has acquired the name of
_realism_,[173:16] and is evidently as close to common sense as any
epistemological doctrine can be said to be. If the knowledge consists in
some sign or symbol which in my mind stands for the object, but is
quite other than