Page:Knowing and acting.djvu/24

 single something of which the one is just more and the other less? Are we more alive, or more spiritual, when we know or when we act? Is there any sense in such comparisons? In asking such questions we proceed on a false assumption, and we entangle ourselves further in misconception. We generate misleading expectations: we try to find in each of our two powers what not it, but the other, can furnish; we look for truth in action and for good—practical good—in knowing, and in both cases in vain, for the good of knowing is Truth, and the truth of acting is Goodness. The source of our error here is the 'scientific' prejudice that either differences of kind exist genuinely nowhere, or that if they do they are unintelligible. We may be grateful for the implied doctrine that no difference is genuine except one which is intelligible. But the prejudice is a prejudice, and to rest in it is to evade our issue. Everywhere science tries to substitute the one sort of difference for the other, and forgets that, while they may go together, the one is not the other, and that concurrence is not identity. The qualitative difference between red and blue is not the quantitative difference between two wave lengths, and the difference between doing and knowing is not one of degree of truthfulness or practical goodness or of spirituality, &c.—at least, not merely and not genuinely that.

Another suggestion is one more often implied than expressed, used than declared. It is that the relation is one of analogy. It may seem odd to speak of the relation between two analogues as a special sort of difference, yet surely if two things are truly described as analogous they must be different, and different in a special way. Kant even defines Analogy as 'an exact similarity of two relations between quite dissimilar things'. Analogy presupposes