so long as I remain alive. And I myself, the essential me,
am the light and watcher in the mouth of the cave.

So I think of myself, and so I think of all other human beings, as
circles of thought and experience, each a little different from the
others. Each human being I see as essentially a circle of thought
between an internal and an external world.

I figure these circles of thought as more or less imperfectly focussed
pictures, all a little askew and vague as to margins and distances.
In the internal world arise motives, and they pass outward through the
circle of thought and are modified and directed by it into external
acts. And through speech, example, and a hundred various acts, one such
circle, one human mind, lights and enlarges and plays upon another. That
is the image under which the interrelation of minds presents itself to
me.

2.5. THE PROBLEM OF MOTIVES THE REAL PROBLEM OF LIFE.

Now each self among us, for all its fluctuations and vagueness of
boundary, is, as I have already pointed out, invincibly persuaded of
Free Will. That is to say, it has a persuasion of responsible control
over the impulses that teem from the internal world and tend to express
themselves in act. The problem of that control and its solution is the
reality of life. "What am I to do?" is the perpetual question of our
existence. Our metaphysics, our beliefs are all sought as subsidiary to
that and have no significance without it.

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