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Knowledge, Action and Religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
The relation of knowledge to action and of theory to practice constitutes one of the most vital problems for human thought to-day. The classical philosophy, which the Catholic Church has inherited from the master-minds of ancient Greece, tends on the whole to rank theory above practice, and to maintain that ultimately we act for the sake of knowing. Characteristically modern thought, on the other hand, in most of its multifarious forms, inverts this order of precedence. We are commonly taught to-day that knowledge exists for the sake of action, and that theories are to be judged true or false according to their tendency to promote or hinder those severely practical aims, the attainment of which must constitute the main business of living. It is with the causes of this change of mind, and the judgment which we ought to pass upon its general value, that I propose to deal in this article.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1937
References
page 209 Note 1 Doubtless it is a more important consideration that I can never compare the image with the tree itself, but only with other images or sense-impressions. All “sense-data” are originally apprehended as significant of something; and it is their essential significance which escapes us when we try to analyse or classify them in terms of causation.
page 210 Note 1 If a past event were really presented as actually happening, the event would be repeated now. In the dramatic representation of a historical event there is some show of repeating it; but it is only a show, precisely because, however vivid the representation, the original causes and effects of the event are absent. In so far as any representation of a historical event gives me a true idea of the event itself, the representation is precisely not a repetition of the original (still less, as Macmurray suggests in Interpreting the Universe, a substitute for it), but an image significant of it.
page 211 Note 1 We never literally “see a thing happen.” What we see is the change in phenomena (perceived objects) which the happening produces.
page 219 Note 1 Psalm lxxvii, verses 7–11.
page 219 Note 2 Browning: Rabbi ben Ezra.
page 220 Note 1 Tennyson: Flower in the Crannied Wall.
page 220 Note 2 Wordsworth: Peter Bell.