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.

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 mo