Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/46

44 persons. Organic bodies are undoubted realities and compared with interests they are simple and easily recognized. And so by many they are regarded as more real than the interacting persons of whose growing lives they are but aspects. .By such the true order of dependence is reversed and personal life is made to depend upon impersonal bodies and processes. Evolutionism is a common outcome of such philosophising. The origin and growth of the body is regarded as a blind, impersonal process. In time this philosophy will correct itself, but meanwhile, since as a philosophy it is an active interest working among and controlling other active interests, and since it makes life depend upon a lifeless and unmanageable process, all evolutionism is depressing and destructive to life. In contrast with materialism, idealism and evolutionism, our philosophy, recognizing the dependence of life only on the personal and manageable, is optimistic. It is an active interest working among other interests to reenforce them and increase life. Our philosophy is known as spiritual realism. Its first modern exponent was Berkeley.

In studying life as a part of a world-whole we were led to conclude that all our interests are supported by other persons, and that as we organize our interests consciously we must subordinate them all to the interests in persons, so that when our highest good is being achieved the lesser interests will be revealed as mere abstract aspects of the fuller interests. But in the genesis of our interests there is always, because of the constant necessity of satisfying organic and instinctive needs, an early exercise of organic interests, and so an early testing of the values found in satisfying them. They are the known and the concrete, they cannot be doubted. The practical life is lived in exercising these and closely associated industrial and commercial pursuits. Thus commercialism and industrialism arise and remain the philosophies of perhaps most people. But we live in interaction with others and all our interests are conditioned by this fact. Others with us are the determiners of all values. Interests in others are the nourishers of all other interests. But to achieve these higher interests and the fullest living we must risk the loss of all the lower and tested interests. We must really consent to the painful loss and death of the old interests and serve others for naught before we can achieve and test and know the higher interests. Only then can we realize that all the lower interests can be preserved and even increased in service. What was worth saving in the old practical life is saved in the new practical life and commercialism and all forms of selfishness are known to be false. Meanwhile commercialism and all such philosophies depress and destroy the lives of all those who are controlled by them. But our realistic philosophy is an interest that