Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/34

32 beautiful and dear to us, so our Father, as the support of this new social interest, becomes loved, and interests expressed in ideas and acts engaged in in order to further his life, or do his will, become the supremely satisfying religious interests. He is no longer valued as a mere means of a livelihood, or as an aid to our achievement of any economic or political success, but for the joy of recognizing his character and of being in his presence, either with or without his attention. As God realizes his life in furthering the interests of men, our interests in doing his will, will commonly be created or realized as we, thoughthrough [sic] our faith in men, seek in various ways the well-being of men. In other words we must learn to be and to act like God in order to know him, and in order to achieve the religious interests and thus test religious values.

The world-whole, the world of persons seems to permit of no greater values than those which are embodied in moral and religious interests, the religious being but the moral extended to embrace the greatest person of all, even God. Moral and religious interests grew out of the organic and the prudential. The latter are tested first and are trusted as the most concrete and practical. The practical may come to embrace esthetical and theoretic values. But the moral and religious values once being proved and thus made concrete, all lower values become embraced by them, depend upon them, and without them would sicken and die. One who acts from love of others and then becomes absorbed in industrial, esthetical, or scientific pursuits to the extent that he is unmindful of the interests of others, has at first a feeling of constraint, a sense of duty or sin, but later, unless this feeling of constraint corrects his sense of values, there arises an increasing conflict between his interests and those demanded by the nature of the world-whole, the world of persons. The interests in others are supported by the nature of the world, and because persons that stimulate and sustain these interests are abiding or eternal, these interests may abide as the core of one's life. All other objects in time vanish, and interests supported by them must fail unless they can be made to support the interests of others and so the interest in others. Moral and religious interests are the truly concrete and the practical. Other interests can survive only as abstract aspects of these more inclusive interests. The interests we at first most fully trust must die in order to live as elements of the life that is to abide. Without love of others the promise of the world and all of its glories will prove false. And in love of others we may realize at any and all times our highest good, the greatest values at that time within our reach; and at the same time, through the ideas and the acts through which these highest values are