its practical bearings is entirely lost, such pursuit will cease to be nourished by the energies of the stock out of which it grew, and it will sicken and die. But also, when these new values have once been lived, they must henceforth support their nourishing stock, and if they are cast aside the values of the prudential interests will tend to vanish, and they themselves will sicken and die. The fuller concrete reality, the truly practical, can not be understood until both the old and the new interests are seen to be but abstract aspects of it.
Section 17.
In a similar way men achieve interests in persons. At first the persons in our environment are needed because they help us to satisfy our interests. Parents, playmates, and others are indispensable to the child’s life. The child is absorbed in what they help him to do, rather than in them. Interests in others are at first incidental and secondary. But as we check our other interests and recognize others, especially as we communicate with them, we come to know them sympathetically. We become interested in their interests, in what they are doing. Then, if their interests are checked our own interests are blocked. Seeing their interests fulfilled has become our interest, and our lives are fulfilled as we succeed in cooperating with others so as to aid them in getting what they want. Our lives have grown from being absorbed in egoistic interests and a life in which others were valued only as they were thought to contribute to these interests, to an altruistic one in which we are absorbed in interests recognized as supporting the interests of others. Interests stimulated and controlled by the love of others are discovered to have a value in themselves, and those who stimulate these interests, like the objects that stimulate and sustain the interests of the esthetic life, become increasingly valued, and are loved. Henceforth, we are practical, realize tested values, or get what we want, in cultivating, or exercising, or indulging our interests in others. Finally the lower interests out of which these moral interests grew come to depend upon them, as the earlier stock of a vine comes to depend upon the parts that are growing, so that if one who has rejoiced in these moral interests loses his interest in others, he is apt to become weary of his older interests.
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
