to me to savour of the headlong actions of stupidity. To suppress a
passion or a curiosity for the sake of suppressing a passion is to my
mind just the burial of a talent that has been entrusted to one's care.
One has, I feel, to take all these things as weapons and instruments,
material in the service of the scheme; one has to take them in the end
gravely and do right among them unbiassed in favour of any set. To take
some poor appetite and fling it out is to my mind a cheap and
unsatisfactory way of simplifying one's moral problems. One has to
accept these things in oneself, I feel--even if one knows them to be
dangerous things, even if one is sure they have an evil side.

Let me, however, in order to express my attitude better, make a rough
grouping of the motives I find in myself and the people about me.


2.6. A REVIEW OF MOTIVES.

I cannot divide them into clearly defined classes, but I may perhaps
begin with those that bring one into the widest sympathy with living
things and go on to those one shares only with highly intelligent and
complex human beings.

There come first the desires one shares with those more limited souls
the beasts, just as much as one does with one's fellow man. These are
the bodily appetites and the crude emotions of fear and resentment.
These first clamour for attention and must be assuaged or controlled
before the other sets come into play.

Now in this matter of physical appetites I do not know whether to
describe myself as a sensualist or an ascetic. If an ascetic is one who