We hope we have already sufficiently emphasised the falsity of such a view. Obviously, if the Mind were merely the passive recipient of a stream of impressions, no sort of rational Discourse, no scientific or cognitive effort could ever have been stimulated into activity, and the very ideas of causality and relation, indeed all that we associate with the exercise of the understanding, could never have been called into being.
Upon neither of these views of the nature of Knowledge can we arrive at any consistent or intelligible conception of its genesis, nature, or method of operation.
What, then, must we do? It is hardly doubtful that if we are to make any progress we must find another and a new key whereby to unlock the double door that bars the entrance to the inner shrine of truth.
Now the fundamental, or at least a fundamental error characteristic of all these various efforts after a solution is to be found in the fact that they view the World as a static thing rather than as a kinetic process.
The World to vision seems a great still thing in or on which no doubt innumerable bodies are moving to and fro, but which itself—the fundamental thing—is solid and unchanging. But this is an illusion. The seemingly unchanging features are changeless only in the monotony of their constant mutation.
Cohering masses are rigid in respect only of the constancy of the dynamic process of transmutation in which cohesion consists. The sun shines eternally steady only in consequence of the ceaseless kinetic energies which give it being.
What we are ever doing in rational Discourse, what Knowledge constantly accomplishes, is to furnish an account, a reproduction of a series of operations. The World is a process—an activity. That was recognised as long ago as the days of Heracleitus, but his disciples did not—although we think there is good ground for believing that he did[60:1]—his disciples did not realise that a process, whilst it implies constant flux and change, implies also something permanent even in its mutations, something which undergoes the change and sustains the flow.
To understand a thing is to discover how it operates. The eternal forms of things are laws of natural action. Such are the law of gravitation, the laws of optics or of chemical combination. A static picture unless so interpreted must be at once valueless and meaningless.
It follows that Thought and Discourse, in furnishing us with Knowledge, must themselves be active, and must in some way or other reproduce the activity of Nature. Thought, in short, is an Activity which reproduces the activity of things, the activity in which the phenomena of Nature arise.