Page:Knowing and acting.djvu/22

 it is sure of the difference between our 'active' and our 'passive' powers, our doing and our knowing. This is no special doctrine of the so-called 'Faculty-Psychology', but the common property of all Psychology. It is acknowledged indeed that somehow these differents are one, but of the how no account is vouchsafed. The dogmas of the unity and the diversity of the self are simply left standing side by side in the psychological Quicunque vult. They are to be taken as brute facts thrust upon an intelligence which has no office but to take note of them. Man is man, both active and cognitive, human nature is both one and two (or more), as if 'both-and' were words of any meaning or the statement that employs them of any genuine significance. Psychology but continues the work of common sense, and often does little more than add a pseudo-scientific authority to its naïve deliverances and prejudices. Here it is content for the most part to magnify the difference, and thereby to render the philosophic problem no clearer but only more urgent.

Neither common sense nor Psychology takes its distinctions with sufficient seriousness. Can either produce a clear, precise, steady definition of doing or of knowing, 'conceptions' with which they constantly and unreflectingly 'work'? The meanings of the one and the other perpetually run together, cross and change places, admit into their circle members from the other, and are constrained to interpolate between their private domains endlessly continuous links of hybrid nature. The types of the man of action and the man of thought flicker and melt into one another. The statesman, to be a statesman, must think and know, the philosopher in his most abstract speculations is surely not doing nothing at all (or why