God and the Given

Abstract

The means (I take it), in general, the raw material of experience-the non a priori-that crude experiential content which common sense, science, art, ethics, philosophy and literature have taken and passed through various shaping (and misshaping) conceptual molds until it has become knowledge.'' However extensive and varied the accumulated paraphernalia of terminology and theory assembled in dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, and treatises, and tabulated for general use, the Given still continues to be an inexhaustible mine for philosophy, psychology, and science to work into goods and currencies for the intellectual exchange market of the world. It would be quite impossible to resolve all the store of theory and terminology (and trumpery) which we dignify with the term knowledge back into its original undifferentiated state, or to divine precisely what the would be without the action of mind upon it. Yet it seems possible to isolate to some degree this unsmelted experiential ore, in intention at least, and thus to estimate something of its function and meaning. Although givenness is a singularly suggestive term, it is also a very self-contradictory one, as far as its literal meaning is