Motive

“ But have we any motive whatever in the many cases in which we choose—sometimes after the vain endeavor to discover a ground of preference—between two equally valuable, beautiful, or appetizing objects, between two equally pleasant routes to the same terminus, or between two equally agreeable modes of passing a leisure day or hour? Yet this choice, made without motive, may be a fruitful cause of motives that shall have a large influence in the future. Thus, on the route which one chooses without any assignable reason, he may encounter persons or events that shall modify his whole plan of life. ”

“ You will find at last that one motive is dominant. Either, at the last push, he will do God’s will, or he will do that by which he thinks to serve his interests in the world. Now, what a man does at the last analysis or when pushed into a corner, that is what reveals his real motive. The motive on which he then acts is his only real master-principle. There can be only one such in a life. ”

“ And where we act, as we say, with a motive, where we have in our minds a reason, an aim, an object beyond the act, which the act subserves, there these motives, these thoughts of ends or objects to be realized, are of very different kinds. ”

“ Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam, or caloric, or lightning.—Chapin.
Let the motive be in the deed and not in the event. Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward.—Kreeshna.
We must not inquire too curiously into motives. They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.—George Eliot.
Every activity proposes to itself a passivity, every labor enjoyment.—Jacobi. ”

“ But is it not contrary to all common-sense to expect that the motive will retain any vital strength when the very people who rely upon it admit that it rests on the most shadowy of grounds? The other motive, which is supposed to be so incomparably weaker that it cannot be used as a substitute, has yet proved its strength in every age of the world. ”

“ When we have discovered that for the sake of which any object is chosen, we have come upon the Motive. The intention may be said to embrace the whole object as foreseen. The motive embraces only a part of it, but the vital part, the part without which the object would not be desired and willed. ”

“ Meanwhile, it is here shewn that a motive to an act consists in the association of pleasure with the act; that a motive to abstain from an act, is the association of pain with it; and we are prepared to admit the truth deduced therefrom, that the one or the other motive will prevail, according as the pleasurable or the painful association is the more powerful. ”

“ He will sometimes make a slight change in a motive, or make a development of it, that gives us an entirely different psychological impression of the idea represented by the motive, as indicating some new aspect of it in which the motives are all dovetailed together into a compact whole that is simply marvellous. ”

“ In the case of the Love of Wealth, Power, or Dignity, the Love of Individuals, the Love of Family, and all other causes of our Pleasures, we have uniformly found the Affection to be one thing, the Motive another. The Affection consisted of the association of the idea of the object as Cause, with that of our Pleasures as Effect. The Motive consisted of the association of the idea of the object, as cause, with that of our pleasures, as effect, and the idea of an act of ours, as cause of that cause. ”

“ The association of the thought with the pleasurable end in view, is sufficient to influence the attention, but not sufficient to command it. The will, therefore, has to be called in, to heighten the effect. But in this case, as in every case, the will is called into action by a motive. The motive, like all other motives, is a desire. ”

“ All these lesser motives are appealed to, and the one ultimate motive is neglected. The ultimate motive with the man of every-day life is the will to have an external world. Whatever consciousness contains, reason will persist in spontaneously adding the thought: 'But there shall be something beyond this.'... The popular assurance of an external world is the fixed determination to make one, now and henceforth." (Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 304—the italics are my own.) ”

“ The necessitarian contends that “volition, or an act of the mind, is the effect of motive, and that it is subject to the power and action of its cause.”126 The advocate of free-will replies, If we must suppose an action of motive on the mind to account for its act, we must likewise suppose another action to account for the action of motive ”

“ The other great influence is rather a motive than a source; we may call it, for want of a better word, the sentimental or the altruistic motive—the moral motive; the forces behind it being mainly of a religious or moral origin, philanthropists, students of ethics, and recently, to a great extent, the women and the women's clubs. ”

“ The Believed Motive.—However important it may be to know the motives according to which mankind has really acted hitherto, perhaps the belief in this or that motive, and therefore that which mankind has assumed and imagined to be the actual mainspring of its activity hitherto, is something still more essential for the thinker to know. For the internal happiness and misery of men have always come to them through their belief in this or that motive,—not however, through that which was actually the motive! ”

“ How do we gain knowledge of a human being, that is to say of his motives? "By observing his actions in many different circumstances, especially in extremities of joy, sorrow, fear, temptation, and then by comparing his actions with what we, or others, have done in the same circumstances?" ”

“ Because, relying on the necessary conjunction of motive and action, he proceeds to produce moral effects, by the application of those moral causes which experience has shown to be effectual. Some actions may be found to which we can attach no motives, but these are the effects of causes with which we are unacquainted. ”

“ But this is a pursuit in which every moment employed is a moment wasted. All motives are abstractedly good. No man has ever had, can, or could have a motive different from the pursuit of pleasure or of shunning pain.”—Deontology, vol. ”

“ No motive can be surmised for his desperate deed.’ 118As if men paraded their perplexities to all and sundry, in season and out of season, and wore their motives and intentions pinned on their sleeves—especially such motives and intentions. ”

“ Let us take, for instance, a motive, m, that impels us towards a particular action, and another, n, that hinders us. If these meet in us, the result is not simply a weakening of the power of the one, and a remaining motive of the strength of m minus n. ”

“ I concede to you conscientious motives in what you do. You are sustained by those around you, men of intellect, men of character. I respect them while I differ from them. I appeal, however, to a higher law, and that, I think, sustains me. ”

“ And this is the first motive, a motive founded alike on moral and on intellectual considerations, for the separation of temporal from spiritual power in the final organization of society. The more vigorously we concentrate our efforts upon social progress, the more clearly shall we feel the impossibility of modifying social phenomena without knowledge of the laws that regulate them. ”

“ But is it well, or right, or tolerable, in times like these, to look round for side motives, when the motive avowed is reasonable and probable? I believe, as I believe I live, that many who never knew what it is to work before, are ready to thank God for the chance they now have to live to some purpose. ”

“ What makes life dreary is the want of motive: but once beginning to act with that penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions—there will be newly-opening needs—continually coming to carry you on from day to day. ”

“ We find ourselves, under the influence of these motives, acting, now from desire, now from sense of duty, now in view of what is in itself agreeable, and now in view of what is right; and the various motives which influence us and result in action, may be resolved into one or the other of these powerful elements. ”

“ And in the second division we may distinguish between the habitual tendency to be actuated by one motive, namely, the desire to do duty for duty’s sake, and all other motives, such as love, benevolence, etc. ”

“ The questions of truth and of interpretation are unrelated categories. The essence of motive is that it is ultimately private and impenetrable, and interpretation commonly involves imputation of motive. ”

“ IN education there has to be encountered at every turn the play of motives. Now, the theory of motives is the theory of sensation, emotion, and will; in other words, it is the psychology of the sensitive and the active powers. ”

“ Now, so far as we can judge of His motives of action, as exhibited in His Word and in His Works, do we see a desire manifested to promote His own glory, or to do good to His creatures, and make them happy? ”

“ Again, we might arrange the classes of motives according to the degree in which immediate qualities of feeling appear in them, from unrestrained desire, through desire present but restrained, action for self, action for pleasure generalized beyond self, motives involving a retro-consciousness of self in outward things, the personification of the community, to such motives as direct obedience, reverence, naturalism, evolutionism, experimentalism, pancratism, religionism, in which the element of self-feeling is reduced to a minimum. ”

“ A 'motive' corresponds to one of his 'springs of action.' He shows how every one of the motives included in his table may lead either to good or to bad consequences. The desire of wealth may lead me to kill a man's enemy or to plough his field for him; the [Pg 257] fear of God may prompt to fanaticism or to charity; illwill may lead to malicious conduct or may take the form of proper 'resentment,' as, for example, when I secure the punishment of my father's murderer. ”

“ The contest about the original benevolence or malignity of man had not yet commenced. Speculation had not yet attempted to analyse the mind, to trace the passions to their sources, to unfold the seminal principles of vice and virtue, or sound the depths of the heart for the motives of action. All those enquiries, which from that time that human nature became the fashionable study, have been made sometimes with nice discernment, but often with idle subtilty, were yet unattempted. ”

“ Doubtless, in this as in most matters, a variety of motives and influences played their part in shaping one's conduct. Single and entirely unmixed motives are much more rare than most people believe, I fancy. ”

“ You are both right to amuse yourselves in this world as your faculties best point out, but each radically wrong in attributing motives to the other. What, in all that is wonderful, have we to do with motives? ”

“ And now, is it true that our choice always answers to the strongest motives? This question may be understood in two ways, according as the motives are considered objectively or subjectively. The motives which are the strongest objectively may become the weakest subjectively, and vice versa. ”

“ In the chain of mental operations which, in such a case, intervene between the desire and the volition, a class of agents is brought into view which act upon the mind as moral causes of its volitions;—these are usually called motives,—or principles of action. ”

“ As the character develops under the influence of lower motives, higher motives begin at times to make themselves felt; and these must gradually be substituted for the others. And when they do make themselves felt, high motives are much more powerful than low ones ”

“ The motives that lead us to conceive Reality as a Well-Ordered Series, and as a realm of Appreciation, that is of values, of Selfhood, of life other than the life that is directly revealed to us, by our present conscious purposes, and so as a realm of various Selves. These twofold motives correspond to our own twofold limitations as finite beings. ”

“ How eagerly it attributes to itself all kinds of high motives for the ordinary, or scrubby, or downright mean actions—and attributes the same motives to its fellow asses, to make its own pretenses the more plausible! ”

“ Put these suggestions into practice with true earnestness, and you will soon note astonishing results, and your whole life will be completely changed. An excellent motto for one of pure motives is: Through my will power I dare do what I want to. ”

“ And thereby he learned to differentiate more closely between those historical events which sprang from good motives, and those which manifested only human passion, selfish ambition, and the primitive question, “Who shall be greatest?” ”

“ It is throughout better calculated to display powerful impulses of the feelings and desires, and the instinctive actions of prompt and decided character, than the reflection of minds impelled by various motives. ”

“ In all such cases, which are familiar to every one, we recognise, therefore, a uniform relation between certain moral causes or motives, and the determinations of the human mind in willing certain acts. ”

“ For I see about me a great multitude of little souls and groups of souls as darkened, as derivative as my own; with the passage of years I understand more and more clearly the quality of the motives that urge me and urge them to do whatever we do.... ”

“ What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it. ”

“ If we were to explore the motives that intervene in an infinite number of actions, which are right to outward appearance; we should perceive, they were derived from indirect principles, and performed to answer perverse purposes. ”