Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/9

Rh When it is achieved it may also be referred to as a case of new knowledge and new value born into the world. Because some one was able to be dissatisfied with an old and inadequate interest and to will that it should die, it is able to live again in a new and better interest.

REFERENCES.

Judd, Psychology, chapters, 11, 12. Dewey, How We Think, chapters 1, 8, 9.

The growth of a disintegrating interest may issue not only through the appearance of suggestions coming from the mind in which the difficulty arises, but also, by the appearance of suggestions from other minds with whose interests his own interests are in a process of interaction. For example when one converses with a friend, the interest which that friend is trying to express is experienced by one as in immediate interaction with his own interests, the interests being satisfied or fulfiled in the act of listening. In this case the reality to which the interest being engaged in by the listener is adjusting and realizing itself is the meaning or interest of the person who is speaking. One is, if aware at all of another's meaning, aware of it as immediately as he is of the existence of a suggestion coming from his own mind or life, to aid in integrating an interest which is able thereafter to express or fulfil his own life. It is also true that that which conditions the growth of the new and socialized interest, which one through this immediate relationship to others comes to live, is like that which conditions the growth of interests or knowledge and values from other interests existing in his own life. There must be an interest in his own life and the need its failure to work satisfactorily establishes of the suggested or supporting interests. One’s interest being blocked and it being necessary to reorganize it or form an interest that can fulfil or create itself under the circumstances, certain subjective interests appear as suggestions one after another from his own life or from the lives of others and are either drawn, attracted to, or incorporated in the growing interest, or, if they further inhibit the forming interest, they disappear or are repelled by it.

All of our interests are found in this way to be socialized processes. One, for example, who grows up in ysmpatheticsympathetic [sic] association with a farmer comes to have an interest in a sunflower through which he perceives and values it as a mere weed to be destroyed as a hamperer of his interest in growing a crop. One