have been enacted: history must be made before it is noted, recorded, and studied: enlightened by the historian's labours the statesman sets to work and makes fresh history for the historian once more to note, record, and study. Knowledge thus supervenes upon action: all knowledge is of the past, the fact, the enacted. Action is the sine qua non of knowledge.
But does action produce knowledge as its chief result or as a bye-product? If my answer is the latter, I may be thought to have abandoned my client's case, but really it is not so. For what I contend is that action is for the sake of knowledge in the same sense in which knowledge is for the sake of acting. Now knowing (and, further back, thinking) is primarily for the sake of Knowledge or Truth and only secondarily and incidentally for the sake of Goodness. In both cases we are to ignore the true doctrine that each is primarily for its own sake: in both cases we are to have no regard except to subordinate ends. Still less are we to admit that the true end of either lies in the undivided unity of Life within which they co-operate. The vocabulary of 'means' and 'ends' will not suffer us to raise the only proper question or give the only true answer. Our question is: is it true or not that in the same sense as all thinking and knowing is aimed at, and actually subserves more effective action, so all willing and acting is aimed at, and subserves more successful knowing? My answer is, that it is true.
For, if not, what is acting aimed at, what is it the means to? To reply 'Action itself' is merely to emphasize its autonomy and we must assert the same of knowledge: to reply 'Life' is again to say of it what can equally be said of knowledge, it is to deny it any special end or aim. The only alternative to Knowledge is Pleasure—an
