Here again that something in the mind so difficult to define, so easy for all who understand to understand, that something which insists upon a best and keenest, the desire for beauty, comes into the play of motives.  Pride demands a beautiful self and would discipline all other passions to its service.  It also demands recognition for that beautiful self.  Now pride, I know, is denounced by many as the essential quality of sin.  We are taught that “self-abnegation” is the substance of virtue and self-forgetfulness the inseparable quality of right conduct.  But indeed I cannot so dismiss egotism and that pride which was the first form in which the desire to rule oneself as a whole came to me.  Through pride one shapes oneself towards a best, though at first it may be an ill-conceived best.  Pride is not always arrogance and aggression.  There is that pride that does not ape but learn humility.

And with the human imagination all these elementary instincts, of the flesh, of curiosity, of self-assertion, become only the basal substance of a huge elaborate edifice of secondary motive and intention.  We live in a great flood of example and suggestion, our curiosity and our social quality impel us to a thousand imitations, to dramatic attitudes and subtly obscure ends.  Our pride turns this way and that as we respond to new notes in the world about us.  We are arenas for a conflict between suggestions flung in from all sources, from the most diverse and essentially incompatible sources.  We live long hours and days in a kind of dream, negligent of self-interest, our elementary passions in abeyance, among these derivative things.

2.7.  The synthetic motive.

Such it seems to me are the chief masses of the complex of motives in us, the group of sense, the group of pride, curiosity and the imitative and suggested motives, making up the system of impulses which is our will.  Such has been the common outfit of motives in every age, and in every age its melee has been found insufficient in itself.  It is a heterogeneous system, it does not form in any sense a completed or balanced system, its constituents are variable and compete amongst themselves.  They are not so much arranged about one another as superposed and higgledy-piggledy.  The senses and curiosity war with pride and one another, the motives suggested to us fall into conflict with this element or that of our intimate and habitual selves.  We find all our instincts are snares to excess.  Excesses of indulgence lead to excesses of abstinence, and even the sense of beauty may be clouded and betray.  So to us all, even for the most balanced of us, come disappointments, regrets, gaps; and for most of us who are ill-balanced, miseries and despairs.  Nearly all of us want something to hold us together—­something to dominate this swarming confusion and save us from the black misery of wounded and exploded pride, of thwarted desire, of futile conclusions.  We want more oneness, some steadying thing that will afford an escape from fluctuations.