Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/16

14 with which we live, are full of knowledge and the appreciation of such values as are achieved by its efforts. It is a spiritual reality that embraces the material forms of nature and their energies as elements into which its life can be analysed, and a reality which, being composed of psychological realities or interests like those in man, is ever growing through a process of dying to live, and is ever creating by faith, by thought, and by ever renewed efforts, new life, new knowledge, and new values. As in every thought process, we now proceed to test or prove this suggestion. We trust that by it we may be able to more fully understand our lives as parts of the great world-whole.

REFERENCES.

Morgan, The Interpretation of Nature. Rogers, the Religious Conception of the World, pp. 93-120.

According to this suggestion our experience of nature is an aspect of life supported by the interests of a spiritual reality like man. Like man it supports a large number of interests whose awareness aspects can be analysed into sensory forms and relationships whose support is a dynamism or energy, like the energetic aspect or core of man’s interests. Such a dynamism is of course an unsensed, an invisible, intangible, and an unpicturable aspect of experience for it is the support of our experience of these. In efforts to describe this aspect of reality, especially when he has in view the most general aspect of our experience of nature, namely, physical nature, the physicist must use some term like activity, as when Oersted says that “matter is not an inanimate existence, but an expression of activity.” The word energy is oftener ,used, as when Tunzelmann in his Electrical Theory says: “All the phenomena of the material universe may therefore be considered as arising solely from changes in energy distribution. That is to say, energy is the sole phenomenal basis of matter.”

The higher spiritual reality which, from the point of view of our suggestion, constitutes the chief factor in our environment would of course be differentiated into interests, and these in turn would be capable of being analysed into habits, just as in the case of a man. Consider man’s common interest in expressing himself by means of language. He can live this interest or come to be able to express himself, because he has achieved an organization of certain habits which from our point of view are also powers to awaken and support, powers to determine,