Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/12

10 For example, in expressing a simple thought to a friend, one is not commonly conscious, save feebly at least, of the words, syllables, and elementary sounds he is using, and upon the power to utter which his expression of his thought or interest is so dependent. Thus awareness and feeling of value do not appear in any great intensity in relation to by far the greater part of one’s life, even the ever-increasing store of dynamic habits that make possible the realizing or creating in one’s self of any new life whatever, and the execution of the same either in idea or in overt act. One has many tendencies to action or attitudes where one uses one, or acts once. Because of their omnipresence the attitudes may and do escape attention and the awareness and feeling aspect may seem the obvious and the understood and so the concrete reality. But when seen in a true perspective, the dynamic or energy character of life is immeasurably more concrete than its ephemeral awareness and feeling aspects, or what is most apt to be limited or recognized in any effort to define these aspects.

As an interest in growing becomes satisfying and its value as a means to life becomes appreciated, it may often be reenacted or lived for the pleasure or practical value such re-living gives. In such cases the regular order in which the subsidiary interests grow is repeated and becomes cyclic. Each stage in the growth appears one after another in a cycle as in a poem or song, or even in all economical and customary responses to the environment. The chief determiner of this cyclic nature of the movement of life may now be seen to be the concreter realm of automatized interests or attitudes, the energy aspect of life. Upon what man has been satisfied to go on here clearly hangs the vivid sensory and the vivid feeling aspects of life. Until the presence and nature of this energy aspect of life becomes understood as the relatively independent or important aspect of life, and the habit formed of seeing the awareness, and the feeling aspects of life as very subordinate to or dependent upon this aspect, and so what is commonly regarded as the obvious, the understood, or the concrete is corrected, our lives cannot be understood.

REFERENCES.

When the dynamic or energetic core of an interest is accompanied by a clear awareness aspect, as when an interest is being lived either in ideas, as when an interest in eating an apple is being mentally engaged in, or when it is being realized in