fundamental. Consider, for example, the
interest one feels in spending a day with a friend or in making a new
acquaintance or, say, in entering on the cares of parenthood. Or again,
take the impulse toward research, artistic creation, or artistic study
and appreciation. Or again, take the interest in topography and
exploration. That there is in such phenomena as these a certain
essentially and irreducibly forward look, a certain residual freedom of
our interest and effort from dependence on the detail of prior
experience down to date, probably few persons without ulterior
philosophical prepossessions will dispute. If we call these phenomena
instinctive we are using the term in a far more loose and general sense
than it seems to have in the best usage of animal psychology. If we call
them attitudes or dispositions, such a term has at least the negative
merit of setting them apart from the class of instinctive acts, but it
may carry with it a connotation of fixity and unconsciousness that
after all surrenders the essential distinction. It will suffice to look
at a single one of these instances.

In friendship, for example, there is undoubtedly strongly operative a
desire for the mere recurrence, in our further friendly intercourse, of
certain values that have become habitual and familiar. We may have long
known and become attached to a friend's tones of voice, peculiarities of
manner and external appearance, turns of speech and thought and the
like, which we miss in absence and which give us pleasure when we meet
the friend again. But if the friendship is not one of "pleasure" or
"utility" simply, but of "virtue"[47] as well, there is also present on
both sides a constructive or progressive or creative interest. And this
interest, stated on its self-regarding and introspective side, is more
than a desire for the mere grateful recurrence of the old looks and
words "recoined at the old mint." It is an interest looking into the
"undone vast," an interest in an indefinite prolongation, an infinite
series, of joint experiences the end of which cannot and need not be
foreseen and the nature of which neither can nor need be forecasted. And
there is the same characteristic in all the other instances mentioned in
this connection. It is not a desire for recurrent satisfactions of a
determinate type, but an interest in the active development of
unexperienced and indeterminate possibilities. If finally the question
be pressed, how th