The article studies the manner in which Stephen, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, experiences reality through highly formalized and mediated modes of cognition. The incongruity between cognition and the subject's awareness of it is played out in Stephen's relations with other characters, in the discrepancy between the words spoken in dialogue and the much more elaborate mental process which takes place simultaneously but silently in his mind. His exchange with the dean of studies, moreover, shows that Stephen is unable to encounter the world without projecting onto it a grid of hypotheses where the answer is already potentially contained in the question, thus turning cognition into the mere saturation of a field outlined in advance.