Page:Knowing and acting.djvu/23

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KNOWING AND ACTING
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such dread of his 'destructiveness'?). Can the Poor Law be reformed unknowingly or a theory of heat be devised inactively? Has any psychologist observed an instance of pure knowing or of mere action? Can he honestly claim that his classifications and divisions indubitably carve Reality—psychic reality—'at the joints'?

But to abandon our 'working' distinctions, is that not to return to chaos? Not so: that is not the only alternative. What is clear is that the mind cannot rest in the mere assertion, side by side, of unity and duality or multiplicity. Nor is it fair to charge even common sense, still less Psychology, with complete silence as to the positive relation of knowing and doing to and within the obscure and depreciated unity of the mind or spirit. Suggestions are offered—hints thrown out—for an advance from an untenable position, and these contributions to philosophic insight deserve respectful consideration. Perhaps in critically reviewing them we shall find ourselves collecting the fragments of the integral truth.

The first suggestion is that the difference is not one of mere opposition even within its own sphere: it is not one of kind or nature: positively it is one of degree or amount, yet so wide, so large in amount, as to present a well-grounded appearance of difference of kind. And so, while the real distinction between acting and knowing is one of degree or amount of something common (or of different proportions of the same 'ingredients'), we are for practical, and indeed for scientific purposes, justified in regarding each as a species of a single genus, e.g. human, living, spiritual being, 'psychic fact or occurrence,' &c. This suggestion in effect and intention denies, the genuineness of difference of kind between them, and asserts as the truth underlying it difference of degree. But what is that