much pressure from his will, providing he is sufficiently afraid of the master. In
order that the will may receive training through compelling the performance of
certain acts, it must have a reasonably free field, with external pressure removed.
The compelling force must come from within, and not from without.
On the other hand, there is not the least danger that we shall ever find a place in
life where all the disagreeable is removed, and all phases of our work made
smooth and interesting. The necessity will always be rising to call upon effort to
take up the fight and hold us to duty where interest has failed. And it is just here
that there must be no failure, else we shall be mere creatures of circumstance,
drifting with every eddy in the tide of our life, and never able to breast the
current. Interest is not to supplant the necessity for stern and strenuous endeavor
but rather to call forth the largest measure of endeavor of which the self is
capable. It is to put at work a larger amount of power than can be secured in any
other way; in place of supplanting the will, it is to give it its point of departure
and render its service all the more effective.
Interest and Character.—Finally, we are not to forget that bad interests have
the same propulsive power as good ones, and will lead to acts just as surely. And
these acts will just as readily be formed into habits. It is worth noticing that back
of the act lies an interest; in the act lies the seed of a habit; ahead of the act lies
behavior, which grows into conduct, this into character, and character into
destiny. Bad interests should be shunned and discouraged. But even that is not
enough. Good interests must be installed in the place of the bad ones from which
we wish to escape, for it is through substitution rather than suppression that we
are able to break from the bad and adhere to the good.
Our interests are an evolution. Out of the simple interests of the child grow the
more complex interests of the man. Lacking the opportunity to develop the
interests of childhood, the man will come somewhat short of the full interests of
manhood. The great thing, then, in educating a child is to discover the
fundamental interests which come to him from the race and, using these as a
starting point, direct them into constantly broadening and more serviceable ones.
Out of the early interest in play is to come the later interest in work; out of the
early interest in collecting treasure boxes full of worthless trinkets and old scraps
comes the later interest in earning and retaining ownership of property; out of
the interest in chums and playmates come the larger social interests; out of
interest in nature comes the interest of the naturalist. And so one by one we may
examine the interests which bear the largest fruit in our adult life, and we find
that they all have their roots in some early interest of childhood, which was