e artificial
when men have been busy discussing it almost for three hundred years?
But if the assumption that experience is something set over against the
world is contrary to fact, then the problem of how self or mind or
subjective experience or consciousness can reach knowledge of an
external world is assuredly a meaningless problem. Whatever questions
there may be about knowledge, they will not be the kind of problems
which have formed epistemology.

The problem of knowledge as conceived in the industry of epistemology is
the problem of knowledge _in general_--of the possibility, extent, and
validity of knowledge in general. What does this "in general" mean? In
ordinary life there are problems a-plenty of knowledge in particular;
every conclusion we try to reach, theoretical or practical, affords such
a problem. But there is no problem of knowledge in general. I do not
mean, of course, that general statements cannot be made about knowledge,
or that the problem of attaining these general statements is not a
genuine one. On the contrary, specific instances of success and failure
in inquiry exist, and are of such a character that one can discover the
conditions conducing to success and failure. Statement of these
conditions constitutes logic, and is capable of being an important aid
in proper guidance of further attempts at knowing. But this logical
problem of knowledge is at the opposite pole from the epistemological.
Specific problems are about right conclusions to be reached--which
means, in effect, right ways of going about the business of inquiry.
They imply a difference between knowledge and error consequent upon
right and wrong methods of inquiry and testing; not a difference
between experience and the world. The problem of knowledge _ueberhaupt_
exists because it is assumed that there is a knower in general, who is
outside of the world to be known, and who is defined in terms
antithetical to the traits of the world. With analogous assumptions, we
could invent and discuss a problem of digestion in general. All that
would be required would be to conceive the stomach and food-material as
inhabiting different worlds. Such an assumption would leave on our hands
the question of the possibility, extent, nature, and genuineness of any
transaction between stomach and food.

But because the stomach and food inhabit a continuous stretch of
existence, because digestion is but a correlation of diverse activities
in one wor