Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/24

22 more must he be regarded as inclusive of his various awareness of nature, but partial aspects of his interests. He is also inclusive of the specific experiences of nature which his interests support in others. Other lives, human, subhuman, and superhuman, in unsunderable relationship to him are also in an important sense integral parts of him and they are the sole support of his life and of his varying awarenesses of nature. Beca.use these awarenesses of nature are automatically supported by the lives of those who constitute the environment they are easily and almost universally taken in abstraction both from those who perceive nature and from those who automatically support the interests involved in the acts of perception, and so these aspects of interacting lives seem to most people to be the truly concrete realities.

Persons also, being thus the support of the awareness by others of the sensory, the spatial, the temporal, and the causal forms and motions of nature, of matter and all material objects, niust be regarded as by nature inclusive of matter and energy, and of space, time, and cause and motion. Matter, energy, spaces, times, forces and motions are abstract qualities of persons, as the color or smell of the rose are qualities of the rose, and when they are concretely viewed they are full of consciousness and emotion. For most of our purposes these abstract aspects of reality are the well understood, the truly concrete, the clearly definable and picturable. The more concrete psychological realities or interests, since they do all picturing, are themselves unpicturable. In trying to picture interests or persons we must regard ourselves as material and as caused, and must place ourselves in time and space, thus trying to assimilate the concrete to an abstract aspect of itself, to make the apple depend upon its flavor, to make the rose a quality of its sweet perfume; but persons, like interests, to be known must be lived, they must be reproduced or imitated by us, the effort to picture them or to know them as we know the abstract, determined, and picturable aspects of the higher spiritual reality, aspects into which we commonly resolve nature, is utterly futile. Persons must come to be seen as the concrete, the obvious, the basic and static reality, by those who would understand their lives.

1. Anderson, Social Value, Part III. Bowne, Personalism. Rogers, The Religious Conception of the World. McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology. Ward, ''The Realm of Ends.  Royce, The World and the Individual'', Vol. II., chapter V.