Page:Knowing and acting.djvu/19

 whatever the difference be between them, each is and is named Philosophy. The distinction is not very well expressed, for there is clearly no proper antithesis between 'moral' and 'metaphysical'—'metaphysical' being an epithet of Philosophy in the largest sense of the word, in which it includes moral philosophy and whatever in philosophy is contrasted with it. 'Mental Philosophy' is worse. By the one and the other term I shall take leave to consider meant what at least at Oxford is usually called Logic. What are meant to be contrasted are two parts or departments of Philosophy. The distinction between them presupposes a more fundamental one, which may be most simply expressed as that between doing and knowing, the act or deed and the thought; or, as simply but more concretely, between the agent or doer and the thinker or knower, the man of action and the man of thought.

Here again the basis of the difference—the field or area of it—is clear: it is Life, the life of the spirit or mind. Both differents fall within Life, and each is a kind of living.

Concerning this difference—the difference between doing and knowing—we are now to ask whether it is genuine and real, whether they are so related to one another and to the unity within which they fall that a system is constituted, a system which, in virtue of its own nature and by an inherent necessity, articulates itself thus and not otherwise, and constrains us to think it thus and no otherwise divided, so that in thinking it thus we know it. On no other condition can we admit the offered difference to be genuine and real. My contention is that it is so, and that all other divisions are spurious, or at best secondary subdivisions of one or other. Only so