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
suppresses to a minimum all deference to these impulses, then certainly
I am not an ascetic; if a sensualist is one who gives himself to
heedless gratification, then certainly I am not a sensualist. But I find
myself balanced in an intermediate position by something that I will
speak of as the sense of Beauty.
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