Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/107

 internal conception of mind; and, in the second place, from a merely external conception of subject-matter.

(1) Any one who has grasped the conception of an interest as an activity that moves toward an end, developing as it proceeds thought of this end and search for means, will never fall into the error of thinking of mind (or of the self) as an isolated inner world by itself. It will be apparent that mind is one with intelligent or purposeful activity—with an activity that means something and in which the meaning counts as a factor in the development of an activity. There is a sense in which mind is measured by growth of power of abstraction, and a very important sense this is. There is another sense in which it can be truly said that abstractness is the worst evil that infests education. The false sense of abstraction is connected with thinking of mental activity as something that can go on wholly by itself, apart from objects or from the world of persons and things. Real subject-matter being removed, something else has to be supplied in its place for the mind to occupy itself with. This