HIEROGLYPHICS 
45 
upon you will satisfy you, or even whether it will hold water! 
In the last resort, I shall have to maintain that we are justified 
by experience, by the empirical success in communicating 
thought which has attended, and continues to attend, our 
endeavors. 
But to give a complete answer, I shall have to go back to 
the beginning, and restate the original problem; and I beg 
that you will not suppose that I am evading the question, or 
adopting the Irish method of answering it by another, though 
I know it may sound as if I were. 
Let me set out by restating our original problem; what we 
want is Truth; we want an even closer approach to Reality; 
and we want to discover and discuss the proper means of 
achieving this object. 
Very good; let us start by the simplest of all possible 
enquiries-and the most difficult- "What is anything?" "What 
do we know?" and other questions that spring naturally from 
these. 
I see a tree . 
I hear it-rustling or creaking in the wind. 
I touch it-hard. 
I smell it-acrid. 
I taste it-bitter. 
Now all the information given by these five senses has to 
be put together, although no two agree in any sort of way. 
The logic by which we build up our complex idea of a tree 
has more holes than a sponge. 
But this is to jump far ahead: we must first analyze the 
single, simple impression. "I see a tree." This phenomenon is 
what is called a "point-event." It is the coming together of 
the two, the seer and the seen. It is single and simple; yet we 
cannot conceive of either of them as anything but complex. 
And the Point-Event tells us nothing whatever about either; 
both, as Herbert Spencer and God-knows-how-many others 
have shown, unknowable; it stands by itself, alone and aloof.