Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/34

 there is life there is activity, an activity having some tendency or direction of its own.

In this primitive condition of spontaneous, impulsive activity we have the basis of natural interest. Interest is no more passively waiting around to be excited from the outside than is impulse. In the selective or preferential quality of impulse we have the fact that at any given time, if we are awake at all, we are always interested in one direction rather than another. The condition either of total lack of interest, or of impartially distributed interest, is as mythical as the story of the ass in scholastic ethics.

2. The objective side of interest. Every interest, as already said, attaches itself to an object. The artist is interested in his brushes, in his colors, in his technique. The business man is interested in the play of supply and demand, in the movement of markets, etc. Take whatever instance of interest we choose, and we shall find that, if we cut out an object about which interest clusters, interest itself disappears relapsing into empty feeling.

Error begins in supposing the object already