Page:Knowing and acting.djvu/20

 is it possible to grasp the several nature of the opposed terms and the manner of their interrelation.

Now at first sight nothing seems plainer than the existence and mode of this difference, and yet from the beginning doubts suggest themselves. The two terms are not as ordinarily conceived, sharply defined, or clearly contrasted. Action is not simply ignorance, knowing is not simply inaction or passivity; the terms are not mere opposites. And there appear to be other contrasting terms to each than the other, e.g. making and (in another way) feeling. But making is either a blurred conception which includes certain forms of doing and certain forms of knowing (for we 'make' advances in knowledge as well as chairs and tables), or a subdivision of doing, and feeling is a term with a meaning as vague and shifting as the fact of feeling itself. For reasons which I cannot here develop, I disallow the claim of feeling to stand on a level with doing and knowing: the real or supposed existence of a department of Philosophy called Aesthetics need not cause us to hesitate.

Doing and knowing present themselves as so related within a closed area—which is human nature or life—that whatever there is not the one is the other, and vice versa. Each is a mode of human—or more generally spiritual—being or living. That is their identity, but it is their difference which first strikes us and puts their identity out of remembrance. It will be observed that both terms must be taken very widely—doing as including wishing, willing, intending, &c., and knowing as including sensation, perception, judgment, reasoning, insight, &c. So taken they appear to differ as much at least as Odd and Even in Number, or Straight and Curved in Line. Our aim is, if possible, to understand their difference.