With an increase of our knowledge comes an increased power of control. Until we know a man's motives, we do not really know the man; and until we know the man, our efforts to influence him must be rather blind.
The search for motives appears to carry us in the direction of the systematization and simplification of the embarrassing wealth of objects which are actually the goal of human desires and volitions. Man may desire a boundless variety of objects. His motives in desiring them may, conceivably, be comparatively few.
It should be apparent that both intention and motive have ethical significance. We have our opinion of men capable of harboring certain intentions. But we recognize that some men may harbor them with better motives than others. And we can see that a man's intention may be bad, and yet his motive, considered in itself, be good. How we are to rate the man, morally, becomes rather a nice question.
CHAPTER XV
FEELING AS MOTIVE
49. FEELING. [Footnote: See the notes on this chapter at the end of this volume.]—Two men may recognize with equal clearness the presence of a danger. That recognition may evoke in the one a violent emotion of fear, and in the other little or no emotion. Two men may be treated with indignity. The one fumes with rage; the other remains calm. It is well recognized that men may be susceptible to emotion in general, or to certain specific emotions, in varying degrees. Knowledge is not always accompanied by a marked manifestation of emotion. Thoughts may be clear, but cold. There are, however, natures whose intellectual processes are steeped in emotion. Such men live in an atmosphere of agitation.
Lists of the emotions which correspond to the instincts and fundamental impulses of man have been drawn up. In them we find mentioned fear, disgust, wonder, anger, elation, tender feeling, and so forth; phenomena which, by earlier writers, were classified as "passions," and to which we may conveniently give the name "feeling." We constantly speak of our emotions as our "feelings," and we contrast the man of feeling with the coldly intellectual mind in which emotion is at a minimum.
But it is not alone to such specific emotions as those above-mentioned that we apply the term feeling. Thoughts are agreeable or disagreeable, pleasurable or painful. So are emotions. The agreeableness or disagreeableness, pleasantness or painfulness, which are the accompaniments of thoughts and emotions, have been called by modern psychologists their feeling-tone. It is not out of harmony with common usage to give them the name of feelings. In so doing we contrast them with knowledge and assimilate them to emotion.
Whether every sensation and every thought gives rise to an emotion of some sort is matter for dispute, as is also the question whether every sensation, thought and emotion is tinged with some degree of pleasurable or painful feeling. In the absence of conclusive evidence, it is open to us to assume that some feeling is always present where there is mental activity of any kind. The feeling may be so faint and evanescent as to escape detection, but this does not prove that it is absent.
50. FEELING AND ACTION.—Emotions and feelings of pleasure and pain are the normal accompaniments of the exercise of the instincts and impulses of creatures that desire and will. Within limits, we appear to be able to take them as an index of the strength of the desire and the vigor of the effort at attainment.