A more fruitful way of looking at our human constitution is to see it, not as a bundle of separate faculties, but as a sort of continuous cycle of activities.  What really happens is, putting it very roughly, something of this sort.  To each one of us the world is, or seems to be, eternally divided into two halves.  On the one side is ourself, on the other all the rest of things.  All our action, our behaviour, our life, is a relation between these two halves, and that behaviour seems to have three, not divisions, but stages.  The outside world, the other half, the object if we like so to call it, acts upon us, gets at us through our senses.  We hear or see or taste or feel something; to put it roughly, we perceive something, and as we perceive it, so, instantly, we feel about it, towards it, we have emotion.  And, instantly again, that emotion becomes a motive-power, we re-act towards the object that got at us, we want to alter it or our relation to it.  If we did not perceive we should not feel, if we did not feel we should not act.  When we talk—­as we almost must talk—­of Reason, the Emotions, or the Passions and the Will leading to action, we think of the three stages or aspects of our behaviour as separable and even perhaps hostile; we want, perhaps, to purge the intellect from all infection of the emotions.  But in reality, though at a given moment one or the other element, knowing, feeling, or acting, may be dominant in our consciousness, the rest are always immanent.

When we think of the three elements or stages, knowing, feeling, striving, as all being necessary factors in any complete bit of human behaviour, we no longer try to arrange them in a hierarchy with knowing or reason at the head.  Knowing—­that is, receiving and recognizing a stimulus from without—­would seem to come first; we must be acted on before we can re-act; but priority confers no supremacy.  We can look at it another way.  Perceiving is the first rung on the ladder that leads to action, feeling is the second, action is the topmost rung, the primary goal, as it were, of all the climbing.  For the purpose of our discussion this is perhaps the simplest way of looking at human behaviour.

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Movement, then, action, is, as it were, the goal and the end of thought.  Perception finds its natural outlet and completion in doing.  But here comes in a curious consideration important for our purpose.  In animals, in so far as they act by “instinct,” as we say, perception, knowing, is usually followed immediately and inevitably by doing, by such doing as is calculated to conserve the animal and his species; but in some of the higher animals, and especially in man, where the nervous system is more complex, perception is not instantly transformed into action; there is an interval for choice between several possible actions.  Perception is pent up and becomes, helped by emotion, conscious representation.  Now