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.