Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/50

 The mistake lies in treating these existing activities as if they had reached their limit of growth; as if they were satisfactory in their present shape and simply something to be excited; or else just unsatisfactory and something to be repressed.

The distinction between means and ends external to a process of action and those intrinsic to it enables us to understand the difference between pleasures and happiness. In the degree in which anybody externally happens to fall upon anything and to be excited agreeably by it, pleasure results. The question of pleasure is a question of the immediate or momentary reaction. Happiness differs in quality from both a pleasure and a series of pleasures. Children are almost always happy, joyous—and so are grown people—when engaged consecutively in any unconstrained mode of activity—when they are occupied, busy. The emotional accompaniment of the progressive growth of a course of action, a continual movement of expansion and of achievement, is happiness;—mental content or peace, which when emphatic, is called joy, delight. Persons, children or adults, are interested in what