Abstract
Their confused ideas about what knowledge is and how they know things--and why they know things--prevent their seeing and knowing, result in paralysis or fruitless, directionless activity. For instance, my own reading of Polanyi helped me to see clearly for the first time essential contrasts between Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, the authors I focused on in my doctoral dissertation. Hardy, who was both impressed and depressed by Darwin’s findings and by the dictates of positivist theories of knowledge in the late 19th century, created a character in Jude the Obscure whose life’s ambition was to attend Oxford University and whose life’s tragedy was his inability to get in. In an attempt to convince us that Jude’s tragedy was a loss for all humanity as well, Hardy has Jude lament near the end of the book that there was only one thing he would have been able to do well in his life-“I could accumulate ideas and impart them to others” (Part VI--Ch. 10, 317).
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