Page:Knowing and acting.djvu/21

 Let us—if we can—forget that they are never found except coupled within the unity of a single spirit or spiritual experience: let us look merely at their difference as it is 'thrust' upon us in direct experience and ingenuous observation. What contrast can be greater or more unmistakable than that between the statesman or the man of business, and the philosopher or the poet! Between the genius of Napoleon and that of Kant! Between the conduct of a campaign and the discovery of a theory of heat! Between the reform of the Poor Law and the formation of the Darwinian theory! From some points of view human beings seem sundered into two disparate types, each of which views the other as its rival and antagonist, regards it with contempt, dislike, mistrust, fear or envy, and all the feelings that divide man from man. The great men of action and the great men of thought appear alienated from one another, the links of mutual understanding, sympathy, and co-operation severed between them, each living in a world of his own inaccessible and impenetrable to the other. And we ourselves—the little ones—find ourselves similarly, if more feebly, divided from one another, and each looking within beholds himself as the mere battlefield of two opposites, oscillating between two incompatible forms of living, alternately pursuing two irreconcilable aims, the improvement of ourselves or our estate and the satisfaction of our curiosity. What folly to speak of our common humanity, of the unity of the self! They are but the name of unrealizable dreams, of plain impossibilities.

Science confirms the impression, and endorses the deliverance of common sense. Psychology in particular analyses, divides, dissects our supposed unity into disparate faculties: doubtful as to much in its analysis,