GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

A THEORY OF GOOD OR VALUE 433
Consequently, on the next occasion on which a white
thing was seen and the baby was told "That, too, is white,"
there would be no residue of meaning in the baby's mind
for the announcement to call up; there would, therefore,
be no link between this second occasion of knowing a
white thing and the first. Thus the process which is said
to lead to the formation of abstract ideas would never
be begun, since the baby would never have any foundation
on which to build. For if, on the first occasion on which
the word "white" was mentioned to it, the word was
on the second
meaningless, it would be meaningless
occasion also. Now all people do have a general conception
of whiteness. The conception, therefore, must
have been reached by some other method, and on Plato's
view,
it must have been known in some sense from the
first.
Let us again revert to the first occasion on which a
baby is told "That is white". If the expression "That is
white" is meaningless for it, then, as we have seen, the
process which ends in the comprehension of the general
idea of whiteness could never have begun. Plato concludes,
therefore, that on the first occasion on which the words
"That is white " were addressed to the baby, they could not
have been quite meaningless. There must, then, have been
something in the baby's mind to which the expression
"That is white" hitched on, and what can this something
have been except a knowledge of what "being white"
means? To know what "being white" means, is to have a
kind of knowledge of the universal whiteness, and to have
it from the first.
Plato generalizes this point as follows. Whenever we
come to know something on what appears to us to be the
first occasion, the fact that we do come to know it presupposes
some original acquaintance with what is known.
To put the point in another way, we cannot learn some-
thing new without already in some sense knowing
what it
is that we want to learn. Thus the thing learned turns out
not to have been completely new, and the so-called learn-