It seems to me entirely just to speak of beauty in matters of scent and taste, to talk not only of beautiful skies and beautiful sounds but of beautiful beer and beautiful cheese!  The balance as between asceticism and sensuality comes in, it seems to me, if we remember that to drink well one must not have drunken for some time, that to see well one’s eye must be clear, that to make love well one must be fit and gracious and sweet and disciplined from top to toe, that the finest sense of all—­the joyous sense of bodily well-being—­comes only with exercises and restraints and fine living.  There I think lies the way of my disposition.  I do not want to live in the sensual sty, but I also do not want to scratch in the tub of Diogenes.

But I diverge a little in these comments from my present business of classifying motives.

Next I perceive hypertrophied in myself and many sympathetic human beings a passion that many animals certainly possess, the beautiful and fearless cousin of fear, Curiosity, that seeks keenly for knowing and feeling.  Apart from appetites and bodily desires and blind impulses, I want most urgently to know and feel, for the sake of knowing and feeling.  I want to go round corners and see what is there, to cross mountain ranges, to open boxes and parcels.  Young animals at least have that disposition too.  For me it is something that mingles with all my desires.  Much more to me than the desire to live is the desire to taste life.  I am not happy until I have done and felt things.  I want to get as near as I can to the thrill of a dog going into a fight or the delight of a bird in the air.  And not simply in the heroic field of war and the air do I want to understand.  I want to know something of the jolly wholesome satisfaction that a hungry pig must find in its wash.  I want to get the quintessence of that.

I do not think that in this I confess to any unusual temperament.  I think that the more closely mentally animated people scrutinize their motives the less is the importance they will attach to mere physical and brute urgencies and the more to curiosity.

Next after curiosity come those desires and motives that one shares perhaps with some social beasts, but far more so as a conscious thing with men alone.  These desires and motives all centre on a clearly apprehended “self” in relation to “others”; they are the essentially egotistical group.  They are self-assertion in all its forms.  I have dealt with motives toward gratification and motives towards experience; this set of motives is for the sake of oneself.  Since they are the most acutely conscious motives in unthinking men, there is a tendency on the part of unthinking philosophers to speak of them as though vanity, self-seeking, self-interest were the only motives.  But one has but to reflect on what has gone before to realize that this is not so.  One finds these “self” motives vary with the mental power and training of the individual; here they are fragmentary and discursive, there drawn tight together into a coherent scheme.  Where they are weak they mingle with the animal motives and curiosity like travellers in a busy market-place, but where the sense of self is strong they become rulers and regulators, self-seeking becomes deliberate and sustained in the case of the human being, vanity passes into pride.