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