Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/7

Rh, or a key, to the appreciation of the nature of the parts of the world-whole. We begin, therefore, our study of the world-whole, by a study of interests.

REFERENCES

Dewey, How We Think, ch. 9. Colvin and Bagley, Human Behavior, chapters 1 and 13.

The interests that constitute the lives of each one of us are realities or active processes which manifest themselves either “in mind” as ideas or overtly in acts. They may also be described as efforts through these ideas or acts to fit into or adjust to our environment.

Interests may also be described as dynamic realities. They have this character of power because of habits through the correlation of which the interests are able to realize themselves in these ideas and acts. One, for example, may have an interest in speaking to a friend, an interest whose realization is possible because he has formed habits of pronouncing words, and other habits which result in an arrangement of these words in a definite, orderly way.

Or one who has learned by long exercise certain other habits, and who has formed habits of correlating these habits in a definite way may have a genuine interest in playing a musical composition for a friend; and, moreover, he has the power to execute or realize this interest.

In the exercise of any interest, we may commonly discover two other important aspects besides this aspect of active power. The one is that of a feeling of value or of lack of value in the ideas or acts in which the process manifests itself, the other is that of a cognition or awareness stimulated and supported by certain features in the conditioning enironmentenvironment [sic], an awareness which functions in directing such efforts so that they will issue in ideas and acts that realize the interest. In hoeing, for example, an interest in getting a crop manifests itself in ideas and acts whose value is felt in furthering that interest and in ideas and acts which at the same time are directed by a vague awareness of the weeds which tends to retard that interest. Or, derived from such an interest, there may arise other interests which may result in examining the weeds themselves, and then other feelings and other awarenesses will arise as these acts of observing objects fulfill or inhibit these derived interests.