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I wrote some years ago, that "such knowledge as we can have of the inner nature of anything else we can have only by way of analogy with whatever we are able to know of our own existence."  During the intervening years, I found good reasons to reject such a statement insofar as it is construed as I almost certainly construed it in making it.  My question, then, is whether this is the only way to construe it, or whether it bears some other construction in which it can and should still be made.  I have two comments.

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Of course, "inner nature/' asI can reasonably construe Iny statement above so that I can st)( Inake it. The issue in its case is what is to be understood by "inner nature" and "analogy." Since the only ilUler nature of anything to which we are privy is our own, it's truistic to say that any knowledge we can have of the iruler nature of anything else is by analogy with it. But, again, what is meant by, or included in, "inner nature"? If it's equivalent to "metaphysical character," then the issue is the same as has been clarified under 2 above, and I have to resolve it accordingly. As for "analogy/' I have good reason to allow, as I've argued under 1 above, that even "metaphysical character" is an analogical concept, in that, e.g., such Inetaphysical knowledge as I can have of the universal individual can only be by analogy with such metaphysical knowledge as I can have of myself as a particular individual I would use the tenn, includes but is not exhausted by "metaphysical character." So there Inay well be any number of other merely factual, nOllInetaphysical things that I can know about the inner nature of things other than 111yself by analogy with myself. But in no case can I make or imply a legitimate claim to such knowledge where I cannot give an intelligible sense to the tenns eInployed in the analogy-as I clearly cannot in the case where "experience" is supposedly used analogically with a claim to know the "metaphysical character" of things. ]1

11 December DeceInber 2006