ABSTRACT
This book has taken a long time to reach its present form. It started out as a doctoral dissertation. But twelve years have gone by, during which much has happened in contemporary philosophical discussions to render commonplace what was then considered novel. In particular the rapprochement with traditional modes of philosophy, now an ever more prominent feature of the development of philosophy of the so-called analytic school, has rendered unexceptionable what I then thought its most original feature, the thesis, namely, that the appeal to the given, so characteristic of epistemological discussions in England and America in the period between the two world wars, was simply the intrusion of unacknowledged metaphysical features into the apparently pure analytic treatment of the problem of perception.
