Only slowly and gradually, as it were, has the consideration come into the very forefront of our speculative horizon that there is for man as a thinking being _no_ rigid _separation_ between theory and practice, between intellect and volition, between action and thought, between fact and act, between truth and reality.[169] There is clearly volition or aim, for example, in the search after truth. And there is certainly purpose in the attention[170] that is involved even in the simplest piece of perception, the selection of what interests and affects us out of the total field of vision or experience. And it is equally certain that there is thought in action--so long, that is to say, as action is regarded as action and not as impulse. Again, the man who wills the truth submits himself to an imperative just as surely as does the man who explicitly obeys the law of duty. It is thus impossible, as it were, even in the so-called intellectual life, to distinguish absolutely between theoretical and practical considerations--“truth” meaning invariably the relations obtaining in some “sphere,” or order, of fact which we separate off for some purpose or other from the infinite whole of reality. Equally impossible is it to distinguish absolutely between the theoretical and the practical in the case of the highest theoretical activity, in the case, say, of the “contemplation” that Aristotle talks of as the most “godlike” activity of man. This very contemplation, as our Neo-Hegelian[171] friends are always reminding us, is an activity that is just as much a characteristic of man, as is his power of setting his limbs in motion.