arrange into a sort of order of merit or as it is called a hierarchy,
with Reason as head and crown, and under her sway the emotions and
passions. The result of establishing this hierarchy is that the
impulsive side of our nature comes off badly, the passions and even the
emotions lying under a certain ban. This popular psychology is really a
convenient and perhaps indispensable mythology. Reason, the emotions,
and the will have no more separate existences than Jupiter, Juno, and
Minerva.

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 l