Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/35

Rh reached, we strengthen the interests that gave rise to them and insure the possibility of new fulfilments. [sic]

The history of man consists in the tentative discovery and growth of these interacting interests. This growth may be described as an extension of the concrete. Both in the intellectual and in the moral life there is a strong tendency to be satisfied with proved and understood values. The extension of this realm of the concrete or tested values is painful, for this extension always seems like the death of the old life or interests. It is not at first clear that the newly integrating interest embodies all that was worth while in the old interest, that the old, life will rise again in the new one, and with increased vigor. But as the new suggestion is proved and valued it enters the realm of automatized interests and there abides as the concrete and obvious until it passes through death to be a support to still fuller life.

As new interests become established in one life, that life becomes a centre of life for others, and either passively and unintentionally, or else actively and creatively passes the new life to others. By those who are capable of assimilating such life it is taken over by a process which, while a process of thinking, may also be described as one of imitation, suggestion, or sympathy, as its active, its cognitive, or its feeling aspects are emphasized. Or if the new life is actively and intentionally created in others, it is created by a process of education.

In either case this process of increasing life is highly selective, for the advance can only take place on the basis of past achievements of interests; and these achieved interests, as one imitates or learns the interests of others, attract or repel on the basis of what supports or inhibits what one wants. For when men either think or act, their ideas and acts are but manifestations of what are relatively very stable and persisting realities, the automatized interests or the attitudes that constitute his character. Such realities determine what one can select or know in the lives of others. But through the new ideas and acts thus arising and passing, the more persistent reality grows, creates more life or more reality, just as the leaves put forth by a vine in each new season of growth nourish a persisting and growing stem and then pass away.

The sum of the relatively abiding interests in a man’s life is called his character, and the sum of the relatively abiding interests of men in any historic period is called the civilization or culture of that period, In contrast with nature, this culture is the human environment. It manifests itself in language,