Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/38

36 his power to create a better world for men as a teacher is limited by the interests and ideas of students, or as the Great Teacher was limited in his efforts to establish certain interests in the lives of the men of his time. In efforts to create life in others all are limited by the interests and habits of others. These habits are to others also material elements, and their organizations in interests are material forms to others. These elements and forms resist efforts both internal and external, subjective and objective, to change them. But while from one point of view they limit, from another they are a means or aid to those who would learn how to change their environment, either when taken impersonally and abstractly, or personally, for they make direct communication and so a change of life in others possible. And where a direct changing of the lives in our environment is possible there is also a possibility of causing changes in the impersonal environment. God, because his environment would consist of material forms sustained by lesser spiritual realities like himself could arrive at a knowledge of man’s interests. And being in interaction with man’s interests, and in the main an automatic and energetic support to man’s interests, God could, by giving attention to the elements of his life upon which man depends, vary these elements, now become interests, and conscoiusly [sic] affect the lives of men. The habits in his life which sustain the interests of men in the way above indicated could be reinforced or weakened; corresponding to this would be in the lives of men the vitalizing or the depressing of the correlated dependent interests of men. In such a case the man whose interest was thus supported or depressed would be aware of a power sustaining or weakening his interest which he might be or become able to recognize as not his own. In case of a specific response to his need, like that here seen to be possible, God has communicated with the man so affected, as much as one man can communicate with another man, for in all communication of men, one by using habits of producing sounds merely energizes or weakens the interests of another.

One thing, however, is always in the way of the recognition of the validity of the conclusion that in such cases God is the objective support of the “inspired” experience, and that is the fact that the inspired interest or flash of insight is that of the man who has it, and must always be in terms of his own personal interests and ideas. If, however, his inspiration does have the objective support he thinks it has, then the view that he is the author of his insight, that it is entirely subjective, would be abstract and inadequate. In such cases the error would be exactly like that of the Lamarckians in biology, who, because no change of organic form ever takes place except in a discoverable relationship to the activities of the “organic form,” conclude that such advance in