CHAPTER XVI
INTEREST
The feeling that we call interest is so important a motive in our lives and so
colors our acts and gives direction to our endeavors that we will do well to
devote a chapter to its discussion.
1. THE NATURE OF INTEREST
We saw in an earlier chapter that personal habits have their rise in race habits or
instincts. Let us now see how interest helps the individual to select from his
instinctive acts those which are useful to build into personal habits. Instinct
impartially starts the child in the performance of many different activities, but
does not dictate what particular acts shall be retained to serve as the basis for
habits. Interest comes in at this point and says, "This act is of more value than
that act; continue this act and drop that." Instinct prompts the babe to countless
movements of body and limb. Interest picks out those that are most vitally
connected with the welfare of the organism, and the child comes to prefer these
rather than the others. Thus it is that out of the random movements of arms and
legs and head and body we finally develop the coördinated activities which are
infinitely more useful than the random ones were. And these activities,
originating in instincts, and selected by interest, are soon crystallized into habits.
Interest a Selective Agent.—The same truth holds for mental activities as for
physical. A thousand channels lie open for your stream of thought at this
moment, but your interest has beckoned it into the one particular channel which,
for the time, at least, appears to be of the greatest subjective value; and it is now
following that channel unless your will has compelled it to leave that for another.
Your thinking as naturally follows your interest as the needle does the magnet,
hence your thought activities are conditioned largely by your interests. This is
equivalent to saying that your mental habits rest back finally upon your interests.
Everyone knows what it is to be interested; but interest, like other elementary
states of consciousness, cannot be rigidly defined. (1) Subjectively considered,