Page:Knowing and acting.djvu/33

 and the relation within it of his cognitive and active powers, it follows that the discussion of the one must be clearly severed for a discussion of the other, and yet that there is room and need for a subsequent discussion of their interconnexion. But here and now I may be permitted to make an application of the doctrine at once more general and more particular and practical.

Here at the University, we who are teachers profess ourselves specially characterized by a determinate idiosyncrasy or temperament which prescribes our station and duty in the State. We are born with a special interest in truth or knowledge, with a peculiar love for it: that is what unites us here while it differentiates us from other servants of the State with different endowments and different vocations, which makes a special sympathy, mutual understanding and co-operation possible and actual among us. Not meticulously anxious to vindicate for the truth we discover and endeavour to communicate to our younger countrymen a narrow 'practical' value; we still do not seek or communicate it solely 'for its own sake'; we recognize that its value belongs to it in its union with action, as on the other hand action has no value save in union with it. Nor are we intolerant of those whose immediate business is neither to advance nor to propagate knowledge; we know that without their aid our occupation would be idle, our whole life empty and fruitless. It is our business to keep the brain of the State awake.

But we have here also a narrower or more special function. Our work is not merely to advance knowledge, but to advance it beyond ourselves—to inspire others with the love of truth and to enlist others in the common task, and to do this under limiting conditions prescribed by Nature, the circumstances of our time and place, and the wills of others