This act of taking and using objects already known is practically justified} it is like eating afruit without asking how it was grown. But many theories of knowledge take this retrospective use of things known in virtue of earlier opera- tions as typical of the nature of knowledge itself. Being re- minded of something we already know is taken as the pattern of all knowing. When the thing of which we are now retro- spectively aware was in process of being known, it was prospec- tive and eventual to inquiry, not something already "given." And it has cognitive force in anew inquiry whose objective and ultimate object is now prospective. Taking what is already known or pointing to it is no more acase of knowledge than taking achisel out of atool-box is the making of the tool. Because some theories of knowledge have taken the operations that yield the known object to be merely mental or psychical instead of overt redispositions of antecedent subject-matter (and thus have terminated in some form of "idealism") is no reason for denying the mediated character of all known objects.