Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/36

34, government, science, art, industry, morality, religion and all other human institutions.

When these institutions are regarded in abstraction from the interacting and growing interests or lives upon which when so abstracted, they depend, and become identified with the forms through which they incidentally manifest themselves, they give rise to the same type of static and determined realities, the same concrete or understood realm, as those to which the similar abstraction of nature from its personal cause gives rise. In the latter case man subordinates himself and his follows to the sun, the ocean, the trees, the human body, matter, energy, etc. In the former case man subordinates himself and his fellows to laws, to truths, the church, the Sabbath, etc. The life of each one is lived and grows in efforts at adjustment to nature and to the civilization of his time, and the interests that live through such efforts, when they are most widely viewed or most fully understood, are lived in interaction with or in cooperation with other persons, especially with God.

The superhuman spiritual reality, or God, in interaction with men, is the chief cause or determiner of civilization as well as of nature. Men enter into the creation of nature as relatively passive factors. Their dependence upon God as the support of their experience of nature is very great. But in the case of the creation of civilization God seems the relatively passive factor and to be very dependent upon man. The interests of men that constitute civilization are created by men. For their creation God is dependent upon men. And yet, since men largely make up the environment of God, God can only progressively achieve his life, his power, wisdom and love, in interests resulting from efforts to further these interests of men, their civilization, interests that only live or become created as they are proved or tested by men.

That men might be able to create, value, and know the interests that constitute them, the reaction of the higher spiritual reality to the ideas and acts that express the interests of men has automatically given rise to help which we describe as nervous and other organic changes, Habits are thus formed in the spiritual reality the effects of which on our interest in them we describe as these organic changes. These habits cooperate with, energize, or render easier the further exercise of the interests which are also nourished by us in the act, just as they act in the case of instincts. But in order that the possibilitespossibilities [sic] in the lives of