himself upon its stream, and lives within its rhythm. The
thesis which maintains the inevitable relativity of all human knowledge
originates mainly from the metaphors employed to describe the act of
knowledge. The subject occupies this point, the object that; how are we
to span the distance? Our perceptory organs fill the interval; how are
we to grasp anything but what reaches us in the receiver at the end of
the wire?

The mind itself is a projecting lantern playing a shaft of light on
nature; how should it do otherwise than tint nature its own colour?

But these difficulties all arise out of the spatial metaphors employed;
and these metaphors in their turn do little but illustrate and
translate the common method of analysis by concepts: and this method is
essentially regulated by the practical needs of action and language.

The philosopher must adopt an attitude entirely inverse; not keep at a
distance from things, but listen in a manner to their inward breathing,
and, above all, supply the effort of sympathy by which he establishes
himself in the object, becomes on intimate terms with it, tunes himself
to its rhythm, and, in a word, lives it. There is really nothing
mysterious or strange in this.

Consider your daily judgments in matters of art, profession, or sport.

Between knowledge by theory and knowledge by experience, between
understanding by external analogy and perception by profound intuition,
what difference and divergence there is!

Who has absolute knowledge of a machine, the student who analyses it in
mechanical theorems, or the engineer who has lived in comradeship with
it, even to sharing the physical sensation of its laboured or easy
working, who feels the play of its inner muscles, its likes and
dislikes, who notes its movements and the task before it, as the machine
itself would do were it conscious, for whom it has become an extension
of his own body, a new sensori-motor organ, a group of prearranged
gestures and automatic habits?

The student's knowledge is more useful to the builder, and I do not wish
to claim that we should ever neglect it; but the only true knowledge
is that of the engineer. And what I have just said does not concern
material objects only. Who has absolute knowledge of religion, he who
analyses it in psychology, sociology, history, and metaphysics, or he
who, from within, by a living experience, participates in its essence
and holds communion with its duration?

But th