William Henry Chamberlin

“ As we learn to recognize the superhuman spiritual reality, whom men commonly call God; and as we come to value him as the potent, wise, and loving nourisher of our lives, as our Father, we trust, love, and reverence him. As the flowers stimulate and support our esthetic interests and in doing so become beautiful and dear to us, so our Father, as the support of this new social interest, becomes loved, and interests expressed in ideas and acts engaged in in order to further his life, or do his will, become the supremely satisfying religious interests. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All other objects in time vanish, and interests supported by them must fail unless they can be made to support the interests of others and so the interest in others. Moral and religious interests are the truly concrete and the practical. Other interests can survive only as abstract aspects of these more inclusive interests. The interests we at first most fully trust must die in order to live as elements of the life that is to abide. Without love of others the promise of the world and all of its glories will prove false. ”

“ But every child, just as he begins with the idea that the world is flat and that the sun rises and sets, begins with the idea that the world is made up of such simple realities as matter, space, time, cause, and motions. ”

“ Finally our studies teach us in regard to the meaning of life that life must not be identified with the body, nor should the death of the body be thought of as the destruction of our lives. We have come to view the body as a great instrument slowly and patiently developed through many millions of years, and now as a gift that permits us to enter upon this present and very precious season of growth, of growth in character or principles of action that will rise again into other seasons of growth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Being in immediate relationship to men, God, as a moral being, must strive to create life in men, but he must wait for their interests to develop the sense of need to which the growth of these gives rise, and then through faith in men he must labor in a hope for the becoming real of the unseen. God would certainly have a civilization in which men could make themselves physically comfortable, but anthropology teaches that he had to wait for a vast period of time, many thousands of years, for some genius to discover how to make fire at will. ”

“ In trying to picture interests or persons we must regard ourselves as material and as caused, and must place ourselves in time and space, thus trying to assimilate the concrete to an abstract aspect of itself, to make the apple depend upon its flavor, to make the rose a quality of its sweet perfume ”

“ He taught that we should actively seek to discover and to satisfy the needs of men. He further taught us to rebuke, severely if necessary, the helplessness and presumption that tend inevitably to grow up in the lives of the recepients of our generosity, blinding them to their need of the greater reality made accessible to them by our generosity, the spirit of love itself. ”

“ These same studies teach us that full living is by no means an easy process. For all vital interests include the thought process, and thinking always arises through the death of an old interest and a struggle to create new life, new interests, in the face of obstacles. Even in the love of others, there must be a thoughtful and unavoidable observation of the bearings or meanings of our acts on the lives of others; and then in thoughtful action we cannot assert the fuller interests of life without coming into conflict with the cherished but often false interests of others. ”

“ It is a spiritual reality that embraces the material forms of nature and their energies as elements into which its life can be analysed, and a reality which, being composed of psychological realities or interests like those in man, is ever growing through a process of dying to live, and is ever creating by faith, by thought, and by ever renewed efforts, new life, new knowledge, and new values. As in every thought process, we now proceed to test or prove this suggestion. We trust that by it we may be able to more fully understand our lives as parts of the great world-whole. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For example, in expressing a simple thought to a friend, one is not commonly conscious, save feebly at least, of the words, syllables, and elementary sounds he is using, and upon the power to utter which his expression of his thought or interest is so dependent. Thus awareness and feeling of value do not appear in any great intensity in relation to by far the greater part of one’s life, even the ever-increasing store of dynamic habits that make possible the realizing or creating in one’s self of any new life whatever, and the execution of the same either in idea or in overt act. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As a dynamic, growing part of a world-whole of spiritual realities various stages in man’s growth can be assumed. His growth takes place as his interests manifest themselves in acts and ideas, as that of plants goes on by means of the changing leaves it puts forth. When leaves cease to function in growth they fall. Then growth ceases until a change in the environment takes place and new leaves are put forth. Then growth continues. Just so, the life of man advances through and in connection with his acts and ideas until a change in the environment makes these out of date. ”

“ But even when men come to recognize a dependence of material objects on ideas of these objects, there arises a tendency to regard such undoubted and simple realities or ideas, as the stuff in terms of which the world-whole is to be understood, and thus men become idealists in philosophy. But ideas are abstract and no more independent realities than realities like matter. In fact we form ideas of material things and so ideas are dependen upon material things. Ideas as abstract aspects of interacting interests are of course inert and impersonal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every true man will of necessity be crucified by those whom "he loves, but he will make his death a means of fuller life for others and so, as we now see, for himself, and will be content. Thus in the love of others, each of our fellows may become an abiding source of fulfilment of life here, and in their service each of us may discover here far more satisfying work to do than any of us can hope soon to accomplish, and each of us will of necessity limit his field of joyful tasks and eagerly pray for the cooperation of others, and for more time and strength. ”

“ But God, in seeking to develop man’s cultural environment or civilization by efforts at such immediate development of the interests of men would be handicapped by another limitation. While God differs from man only in degree and not in kind, as our whole attempt to construct an idea of his relationship to men in terms of the experience of men implies, he is far in advance of us in power, and knowledge, and love. His interests could not specifically be like the interests of men. ”

“ It is obvious that such a mode of creation is concerned with the welfare of an individual, but only as the individual is a member of a large group or species. It implies no direct attention to the lives of particular individuals. It is analogous to the growth a teacher causes in the lives of the members of a large class in lecturing to them. He speaks to all and not to particular individuals. The same change of interest and the same kind of brain change take place in all who adequately attend. But with the creation of man’s body this arbitrariness must cease. ”

“ God may have chosen them before they were born, as Jeremiah thought that he was chosen, to be rulers in the lives of men and transformers of civilization.
Especially would God need help in revealing his character and man’s highest interests to men. He could not reveal himself to men through nature, through the sun, the earth, the ocean, or the winds, for these are abstract aspects of his life, and when so taken are impersonal. ”

“ It is not at first clear that the newly integrating interest embodies all that was worth while in the old interest, that the old, life will rise again in the new one, and with increased vigor. But as the new suggestion is proved and valued it enters the realm of automatized interests and there abides as the concrete and obvious until it passes through death to be a support to still fuller life.
As new interests become established in one life, that life becomes a centre of life for others, and either passively and unintentionally, or else actively and creatively passes the new life to others. ”

“ The false must be transformed into the truer, and while the process of transformation was going on, the energies that were manifest in the false ideas and acts would be becoming able to put forth, like an embryonic growth, new ideas and acts. Only through the death of the old life, now become, from being what was as a nourishing and protecting set of leaves, or perhaps a hard shell and a prickly rind, mere refuse, could the new and better life be created. ”

“ One who grows up with one possessed of esthetic interests comes to perceive and to enjoy the sunflower as an object of beauty and one to be conserved. One who grows up for a time with a botanist comes to see and to ideate the sunflower as an object that fulfils certain intellectual interests. And, in fact, co-operation with others is a condition, of the existence and growth of any perceptual or ideational interest whatever. ”

“ Matter, energy, spaces, times, forces and motions are abstract qualities of persons, as the color or smell of the rose are qualities of the rose, and when they are concretely viewed they are full of consciousness and emotion. For most of our purposes these abstract aspects of reality are the well understood, the truly concrete, the clearly definable and picturable. The more concrete psychological realities or interests, since they do all picturing, are themselves unpicturable. ”

“ The sum of the relatively abiding interests in a man’s life is called his character, and the sum of the relatively abiding interests of men in any historic period is called the civilization or culture of that period, In contrast with nature, this culture is the human environment. It manifests itself in language, literature, government, science, art, industry, morality, religion and all other human institutions. ”

“ Viewed in this abstract way these sensations, forms, and motions are determined, inert, lifeless realities, but they are determined by the dynamic or energetic core of an interest, the habits of grasping and chewing which have been slowly formed and correlated. But the abstract sensations, forms and motions, together with the habits that determine them, are elements of the nature of the person who lives the interest. Man has in himself, by virtue of this nature, the wonderful power both to determine and to be aware of sensations, of their space, time and causal forms, and of their motions. ”