activity embodying the student's own interest, where a definite result is to be obtained, and where neither routine habit nor the following of dictated directions nor capricious improvising will suffice, and there the rise of conscious purpose, conscious desire, and deliberate reflection are inevitable. They are inevitable as the spirit and quality of an activity having specific consequences, not as forming an isolated realm of inner consciousness.
2. The Opposition of Duty and Interest.—Probably there is no antithesis more often set up in moral discussion than that between acting from 'principle' and from 'interest.' To act on principle is to act disinterestedly, according to a general law, which is above all personal considerations. To act according to interest is, so the allegation rums, to act selfishly, with one's own personal profit in view. It substitutes the changing expediency of the moment for devotion to unswerving moral law. The false idea of interest underlying this opposition has already been criticized (See Chapter X), but some moral aspects of the question will now be considered.
A clew to the matter may be found in the fact that the supporters of the 'interest' side of the controversy habitually use the term 'self-interest.' Starting from the premisses that unless there is interest in an object or idea, there is no motive force, they end with the conclusion that even when a person claims to be acting from principle or from a sense of duty, he really acts as he does because there 'is something in it' for himself. The premiss is sound; the conclusion false. In reply the other school argues that since man is capable of generous self-forgetting and even self-sacrificing action, he is capable of acting without interest. Again the premiss is sound, and the conclusion false. The error on both sides lies in a false notion of the relation of interest and the self.
Both sides assume that the self is a fixed and hence isolated quantity. As a consequence, there is a rigid dilemma between acting for an interest of the self and without interest. If the self
