Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/10

8 who grows up with one possessed of esthetic interests comes to perceive and to enjoy the sunflower as an object of beauty and one to be conserved. One who grows up for a time with a botanist comes to see and to ideate the sunflower as an object that fulfils certain intellectual interests. And, in fact, co-operation with others is a condition, of the existence and growth of any perceptual or ideational interest whatever. Just as one cannot form a new idea or plan of action without the aid of other interests in his own life, by a process analogous to that of self-fertilization, so one cannot grow into new and stable interests without the stimulus and co-operation of the interests that constitute the lives of others and through a process as of cross-fertilization.

In this socialized growing of interests the field is indefinitely enlarged from which support or correction for the growing interests may be gained, and there is indefinitely increased the probability of successful adjustment and so of living in interests of increasing stability, power, complexity, and richness. All that survive of the interests of the past survive because they have successfully served the needs, in the way just described, of the succesively [sic] arriving generations of men. The interest of an architect living at the present time began to grow in other men as far back in the distant past as the time when men first began to be interested in building. The ideas, percepts, acts of the men of one age promote the growth of the building interests in the men of that generation as the leaves of each season of growth nourish the stem that puts them forth, then, like the leaves. they disappear, but the interests they nourish survive as they are assimilated by and become the interests of each new generation, and the powers, forces, or factors of advancing civilization.

REFERENCES.

1. Merz, Religion and Science, Part I. 2. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order, chapter l. 3. Ellwood, Introduction to Social Psychology, chapter 3.

In the development or integration of any new interest whatever, these primary or relatively abiding interests will be discovered to hold in correlation a number of subsidary [sic] or secondary interests. These secondary interests also grow one after another in a more or less regular order, an order determined by the order in wsich a feeling of need in the supporting interests is felt. In a machine, for example, each part may become the centre of such a derived interest, especially those parts that happen to