Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/29

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The lives of spiritual realities when largely constituted by these instinctive interests are lived in immediate responses to their environment. Such lives as are not so lived imply hesitation, doubt, and thought. Thoughtful lives are able to check the tendency of an interest to live in immediate responses to the environment, and they are able to try an interest on “in mind” and “in mind” to tentatively reintegrate an interest. In this process alternative interests appear, and as they are tried on “in mind” they are held or they are repelled by one’s leading interests. Now interests are formed on the basis of preferences or choices permitted or necessitated by such a mental testing of alternative interests. When the spiritual reality that manifests its interests in organic forms and their correlated instincts created and automatized those of its interests which support the human body and the human brain with its large association areas, it destroyed the possibility of such immediate responses as the lower animals make, forced spiritual realities to select from several possible modes of response, and made them henceforth more largely responsible, upon the basis of such instinctive interests as they had been able to achieve, for their creating of their own interests. Thus the superhuman spiritual reality created for the lesser spiritual, realities about it the possibilities of a new life; and thereupon such of these as were able to respond and to take advantage of the new opportunities thus afforded passed to a new estate and became men. Thus were created free agents, spiritual realities who could actively develop in new and preferred interests, beings capable of responsibility for their interests.

Spiritual realities of a lower grade than man must more or less blindly cooperate with the superhuman spiritual reality in the development of their instinctive interests. If the .superhuman spiritual reality approves of their interests, it would react to them in such a way as to automatically provide them aid or energize them. The manifestation of the interests would become easy through a correlated, supporting, and directing organic structure constantly supported by an automatized interest in the life of the superhuman spiritual reality, and henceforth appearing regularly as an acquired and an hereditary factor in their organic bodies and as a new instinctive interest in their lives. If the higher spiritual reality does not approve of the newly developing interest it perishes by a seemingly arbitrary suppression.

It is obvious that such a mode of creation is concerned