External Perception; Memory; and Belief, in so far as it simulates the
form of direct knowledge. The first is illustrated in a man's
consciousness of a present feeling of pain or pleasure. The second and
the third kinds have already been spoken of, and are too familiar to
require illustration. It is only needful to remark here that, under
perception, or rather in close conjunction with it, I purpose dealing
with the knowledge of other's feelings, in so far as this assumes the
aspect of immediate knowledge. The term belief is here used to include
expectations and any other kinds of conviction that do not fall under
one of the other heads. An instance of a seemingly immediate belief
would be a prophetic prevision of a coming disaster, or a man's
unreasoned persuasion as to his own powers of performing a difficult
task.

It is, indeed, said by many thinkers that there are no legitimate
immediate beliefs; that all our expectations and other convictions about
things, in so far as they are sound, must repose on other genuinely
immediate knowledge, more particularly sense-perception and memory.
This difficult question need not be discussed here. It is allowed by all
that there is a multitude of beliefs which we hold tenaciously and on
which we are ready to act, which, to the mature mind, wear the
appearance of intuitive truths, owing their cogency to nothing beyond
themselves. A man's belief in his own merits, however it may have been
first obtained, is as immediately assured to him as his recognition of a
real object in the act of sense-perception. It may be added that many of
our every-day working beliefs about the world in which we live, though
presumably derived from memory and perception, tend to lose all traces
of their origin, and to simulate the aspect of intuitions. Thus the
proposition that logicians are in the habit of pressing on our
attention, that "Men are mortal," seems, on the face of it, to common
sense to be something very like a self-evident truth, not depending on
any particular facts of experience.

In calling these four forms of cognition immediate, I must not, however,
be supposed to be placing them on the same logical level. It is plain,
indeed, to a reflective mind that, though each may be called immediate
in this superficial sense, there are perceptible differences in the
degree of their immediacy. Thus it is manifest, after a moment's
reflection, that expectation, so far as it is just, is not primar