us undergo disease, suffocation, drowning. In this twofold
way, water or anything else enters into experience. Such presence in
experience has of itself nothing to do with knowledge or consciousness;
nothing that is in the sense of depending upon them, though it has
everything to do with knowledge and consciousness in the sense that the
latter depends upon prior experience of this non-cognitive sort. Man's
experience is what it is because his response to things (even successful
response) and the reactions of things to his life, are so radically
different from knowledge. The difficulties and tragedies of life, the
stimuli to acquiring knowledge, lie in the radical disparity of
presence-in-experience and presence-in-knowing. Yet the immense
importance of knowledge experience, the fact that turning
presence-in-experience over into presence-in-a-knowledge-experience is
the sole mode of control of nature, has systematically hypnotized
European philosophy since the time of Socrates into thinking that all
experiencing is a mode of knowing, if not good knowledge, then a
low-grade or confused or implicit knowledge.

When water is an adequate stimulus to action or when its reactions
oppress and overwhelm us, it remains outside the scope of knowledge.
When, however, the bare presence of the thing (say, as optical stimulus)
ceases to operate directly as stimulus to response and begins to operate
in connection with a forecast of the consequences it will effect when
responded to, it begins to acquire meaning--to be known, to be an
object. It is noted as something which is wet, fluid, satisfies thirst,
allays uneasiness, etc. The conception that we begin with a known visual
quality which is thereafter enlarged by adding on qualities apprehended
by the other senses does not rest upon experience; it rests upon making
experience conform to the notion that every experience _must_ be a
cognitive noting. As long as the visual stimulus operates as a stimulus
on its own account, there is no apprehension, no noting, of color or
light at all. To much the greater portion of sensory stimuli we react in
precisely this wholly non-cognitive way. In the attitude of suspended
response in which consequences are anticipated, the direct stimulus
becomes a sign or index of something else--and thus matter of noting or
apprehension or acquaintance, or whatever term may be employed. This
difference (together, of course, with the consequences which go with it