be not self-subsistent, but must need the support of other things before it can exist. It is held that whatever has relations to things outside itself must contain some reference to those outside things in its own nature, and could not, therefore, be what it is if those outside things did not exist. A man’s nature, for example, is constituted by his memories and the rest of his knowledge, by his loves and hatreds, and so on; thus, but for the objects which he knows or loves or hates, he could not be what he is. He is essentially and obviously a fragment: taken as the sum-total of reality he would be self-contradictory.
This whole point of view, however, turns upon the notion of the “nature” of a thing, which seems to mean “all the truths about the thing.” It is of course the case that a truth which connects one thing with another thing could not subsist if the other thing did not subsist. But a truth about a thing is not part of the thing itself, although it must, according to the above usage, be part of the “nature” of the thing. If we mean by a thing’s “nature” all the truths about the thing, then plainly we cannot know a thing’s “nature” unless we know all the thing’s relations to all the other things in the universe. But if the word “nature” is used in this sense, we shall have to hold that the thing may be known when its “nature” is not known, or at any rate is not known completely. There is a confusion, when this use of the word “nature” is employed, between knowledge of things and knowledge of truths. We may have knowledge of a thing by acquaintance even if we know very few propositions about it—theoretically we need not know any propositions about it. Thus, acquaintance with a thing does not involve knowledge of its “nature” in the above sense. And although acquaintance with a thing is involved in our knowing any one proposition about a thing, knowledge of its “nature,” in the above sense, is not involved. Hence, (1) acquaintance with a thing does not logically involve a knowledge of its relations, and (2) a knowledge of some of its relations does not involve a knowledge of all of its relations nor a knowledge of its “nature” in the above sense. I may be acquainted, for example, with my toothache, and this knowledge