Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/39

Rh organic form is entirely due to such individual activities. We may properly conclude, as students of philosophy, that the support of the advance in the case of the great insight as in the case of the advance in organic form may be due to the specifically willed cooperation of God in his efforts to further the interests of the persons or sentient realities dependent upon him.

We have often contrasted stable interests that form the core of life and character with the relatively ephemeral ideas and acts to which they give rise and by which they are in turn nourished. In teaching, in creating more life in others, we often err by identifying the life with which we deal with ideas and acts, we fall into the error of taking abstract aspects of the interests of such a life as the concrete realities. It is easy to so regard them. A double error results. Since we seem to be able to conjure up an idea in the mind of another in an instant, we expect to cause character to grow in too brief a time. We expect to create life by magic, by merely wishing it to grow, and we fail. Only by the slow process of education, and by a wise use of ideas and acts, can interests in others be made to increase. And we fall into the next error when we identify the life of another with his ideas and acts, and finding his ideas and acts not such as those which we have and which nourish our own interests, we reject them forthwith. In this we fail to recognize that the ideas and acts of a child or of any other person are the means only, a means ephemeral and vanishing, of growth for far more fundamental attitudes towards the world. But foolishly identifying the abstract aspect with the very concrete reality, we often despise the life for its ideas, falsely regarded as false, and .a cause or a people that are nourishing the truest attitudes towards God and man and nature, we reject for no truer reason. One’s interests require simple ideas, those of another require critical ideas, one’s work requires a simple tool, another’s will require a most complex and delicate one, the only test of the validity of the idea or of the tool that most men can or do employ is the outcome. By fruits, by good works, far more than by beliefs or ideas, are men and causes to be properly judged. A good teacher must avoid both these errors.

In his efforts to create a civilization for man God is limited as is the teacher. In inspiring the insights of men use must always be made of the ideas of men. These ideas, though ephemeral, must be used to further a fundamental interest or attitude, if this attitude is to be nourished at all. Awakening and stabilizing interests in the self or in others is a difficult process. In teaching others one usually seeks to create one stable interest at a time. In doing this he must awaken a similar interest in the one whom he would teach, and he must then use ideas and acts resultant from that similar interest as a means of checking and reforming that interest until its growth is satisfactory. These means are,