I confess I find myself a confusion of motives beside which my confusion of perceptions pales into insignificance.

There are many various motives and motives very variously estimated—­some are called gross, some sublime, some—­such as pride—­wicked.  I do not readily accept these classifications.

Many people seem to make a selection among their motives without much enquiry, taking those classifications as just; they seek to lead what they call pure lives or useful lives and to set aside whole sets of motives which do not accord with this determination.  Some exclude the seeking of pleasure as a permissible motive, some the love of beauty; some insist upon one’s “being oneself” and prohibit or limit responses to exterior opinions.  Most of such selections strike me as wanton and hasty.  I decline to dismiss any of my motives at all in that wholesale way.  Just as I believe I am important in the scheme of things, so I believe are all my motives.  Turning one’s back on any set of them seems to me to savour of the headlong actions of stupidity.  To suppress a passion or a curiosity for the sake of suppressing a passion is to my mind just the burial of a talent that has been entrusted to one’s care.  One has, I feel, to take all these things as weapons and instruments, material in the service of the scheme; one has to take them in the end gravely and do right among them unbiassed in favour of any set.  To take some poor appetite and fling it out is to my mind a cheap and unsatisfactory way of simplifying one’s moral problems.  One has to accept these things in oneself, I feel—­even if one knows them to be dangerous things, even if one is sure they have an evil side.

Let me, however, in order to express my attitude better, make a rough grouping of the motives I find in myself and the people about me.

2.6.  A review of motives.

I cannot divide them into clearly defined classes, but I may perhaps begin with those that bring one into the widest sympathy with living things and go on to those one shares only with highly intelligent and complex human beings.

There come first the desires one shares with those more limited souls the beasts, just as much as one does with one’s fellow man.  These are the bodily appetites and the crude emotions of fear and resentment.  These first clamour for attention and must be assuaged or controlled before the other sets come into play.

Now in this matter of physical appetites I do not know whether to describe myself as a sensualist or an ascetic.  If an ascetic is one who suppresses to a minimum all deference to these impulses, then certainly I am not an ascetic; if a sensualist is one who gives himself to heedless gratification, then certainly I am not a sensualist.  But I find myself balanced in an intermediate position by something that I will speak of as the sense of Beauty.  This sense of Beauty is something in me which demands not simply gratification but the best and keenest of a sense or continuance of sense impressions, and which refuses coarse quantitative assuagements.  It ranges all over the senses, and just as I refuse to wholly cut off any of my motives, so do I refuse to limit its use to the plane of the eye or the ear.