Grant that intellect is a special movement or mode of practice; grant that we are not merely acting (are we ever _merely_ acting?) but are “specially occupied and therefore subject to special conditions,” and the problem remains _what_ special kind of activity is thinking? what is its experienced differentia from other kinds? what is its commerce with them? When the problem is _what_ special kind of an activity is thinking and of _what_ nature is the consistency which is its criterion, somehow we do not get forward by being told that thinking _is_ a special mode of practice and that its criterion _is_ consistency. The unquestioned presupposition of Mr. Bradley is that thinking is such a wholly separate activity (the “intellect _alone_” which has to be satisfied), that to give it autonomy is to say that it, and its criterion, have nothing to do with other activities; that it is “independent” as to criterion, in a way which excludes interdependence in function and outcome. Unless the term “special” be interpreted to mean _isolated_, to say that thinking is a _special_ mode of activity no more nullifies the proposition that it arises in a practical contest and operates for practical ends, than to say that blacksmithing is a _special_ activity, negates its being one connected mode of industrial activity. His underlying presupposition of the separate character of thought comes out in the passage last quoted. “Our impulse,” he says, “is to alter the conflicting situation and, _on the theoretical side_, to bring its contents into peaceable unity.” If one substitutes for the word “on” the word “through,” one gets a conception of theory and of thinking that does justice to the autonomy of the operation and yet so connects it with other activities as to give it a serious business, real purpose, and concrete responsibility and hence testibility. From this point of view the theoretical activity is simply the form that certain practical activities take after colliding, as the most effective and fruitful way of securing their own harmonization. The collision is not theoretical; the issue in “peaceable unity” is not theoretical. But theory names the type of activity by which the transformation from war to peace is most amply and securely effected.[22]